“The general election campaign will get personal in the new year,” the Sunday Times reported yesterday, “with the Conservatives set to attack Sir Keir Starmer’s defence of terrorists and sex offenders and Labour planning a counteroffensive against Rishi Sunak’s tax affairs.”
It listed four cases between 2000 and 2006 in which Starmer — then best known as a criminal defence lawyer — had acted for defendants accused of criminal offences.
But if the Conservatives are going to judge Starmer by his clients, why wait until the new year? Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph reported that the KC had acted for an extremist Islamist group which tried unsuccessfully to persuade the European Court of Human Rights that Germany had acted unlawfully by banning it.
But not for long. According to the Telegraph, the Hizb ut-Tahrir website announced on 25 June 2008 — the day it lodged its application — that the group’s legal team was led by Starmer. A month later, Starmer was named as the new head of the Crown Prosecution Service. Before taking on the job that November, he withdrew from all privately-funded work. There was no mention of him in the court’s ruling when the claim was thrown out four years later.
These days, some barristers may honour the “cab-rank” rule more in the breach than the observance. But it’s fundamental to the rule of law that people don’t associate lawyers with their clients. If we say that barristers should not represent people accused of terrorism, sexual offences and other serious crimes, those defendants will not be fairly tried. And if they are not fairly tried, they may be wrongly acquitted.
Effective prosecutors are essential if justice is to be done. But so are effective defence lawyers. Starmer, of course, has been both.
I agree with all the comments so far, although I would argue that Joshua’s original piece should have stressed that those unrepresented defendants may be unfairly convicted as well as acquitted (probably he was being deliberately contentious!).
As a former legal aid defence lawyer I often had to bite the bullet when it came to taking on alleged sex offenders or, worse still, alleged child murderers. Interestingly, my main concern was not the feelings of the general public, but the sudden high moral standards of my regular criminal clients!
I of course agree with Joshua and Alisdair.
1. It was shocking when in Birmingham friends and colleagues refused to act for the (as we now know) wrongly accused bombers but then office support staff had threatened to walk out en masse should those practices take on their cases.
2. Mind you when asked by a duty solicitor friend who one Saturday court morning had declined to act for the piper at McDade’s Coventry funeral on even a minor charge I agreed to do so - but then on leaving court I had looked at the underneath of my car before driving off, such was the stifling fear and anti- Irish prejudice spreading like wildfire and I caught myself - momentarily - giving in to it.
3. Many years later, as he had cheerfully volunteered on the BBC Today radio programme, then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had for what he had viewed as diplomatic and trading reasons agreed to have the Mojaheddin -e- Khalq [MEK] [a dissident and nonviolent Iranian opposition movement] deemed terrorists and therefore proscribed.
It took years of (independent and freedom loving) lawyers’ and cross- party Parliamentary effort (most of it unpaid and international as well as domestic) and Court hearings from the Prohibited Organisations Appeals Commission [POAC] all the way up to the Appeal Court to have the government of the day - albeit churlishly - withdraw that gratuitous and malign designation. “Perverse “ was amongst the politest judicial descriptions of a government obstinately holding out for so long without a feather to fly.
And so it goes on- and on.