The sentencing last week of the man who attacked employees of an immigration law firm in 2020 reminded me that one of the most important events in 2024 for our profession arose out of the threats to various immigration law firms during this summer’s riots. Attacks on solicitors are growing.
I wrote last week about climate activists targeting the office of a City law firm (‘protestors occupied the firm’s lobby, while others sprayed the outside of the building with fake oil’).
The linkage of two qualitatively different events may outrage some, because the reasons behind the two sets of incidents are so different, as is their potential outcome. We may find the motivation behind one good (to save humanity and the planet), with no intention to physically harm any individual lawyer, and the other bad (with the intention to cause serious harm to a section of humanity). I understand that.
But they share the targeting of lawyers and law firms in a way that we have not seen before, pointing to a future where the lawyer is the route to the client and is to be punished for the client’s actions. (Unfortunately, the template was set for them over the last few years by governments, which have increasingly used lawyers as the route to clients, particularly in the area of tax avoidance and money laundering.)
The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) released last week a report on threatening behaviour and aggression towards lawyers, to coincide with Human Rights Day on 10 December.
The UK is not alone in seeing intimidation of immigration lawyers. The CCBE reports that, in Ireland, the recent publication of a targeted article aimed to discredit the work of immigration lawyers resulted in death threats and a campaign of harassment against members of the Irish Immigration Lawyers Association.
Over half of European lawyers responding to the CCBE survey (a self-selecting group) had been the victims of threatening behaviour or aggression at least once over the last two or three years. Much of this was verbal aggression, but harassment, threatening behaviour and physical aggression (which had the lowest incidence) were occurring more frequently. One out of three of the responding lawyers considered leaving the profession at least once because of encounters with such behaviour.
In the land of guns, the US, a trial got underway last month of a man accused of shooting a lawyer on behalf of a litigant friend. Apparently, the lawyer who was shot – and survived – was mistaken for the target, who was of similar size and also a lawyer at the same firm. The litigant on whose behalf the attempted assassination was carried out killed himself the day after the hit by driving into a pole at 105 mph, once he had written a new will leaving his house to his wife.
In Europe, a limited remedy to rising aggression against lawyers is seen in the forthcoming convention for the protection of the profession of lawyer, which is going through its final approval processes at the Council of Europe. As frequently stated, it is a historic document, since it will be the first time that the rights of lawyers will be protected by an international treaty or convention. Being a Council of Europe initiative, it will apply to the UK if our government ratifies it.
There are provisions in the draft convention that say that signatory states should ensure not only that lawyers should not be identified with their clients or clients’ causes, but also that such states should ensure that lawyers and professional associations are able to carry out their professional activities without being the target of physical attack, threat, harassment or intimidation.
Since signatory states will be the parties to the future convention, they are the only ones to be bound by it.
Of course, this is a very distant shield for our protection, which will not help us in the immediate moment of an attack. But it is better than nothing.
The problem is that, once the wall protecting lawyers from responsibility for their clients’ future civil actions is breached, many people can climb through the broken wall, the good and the bad together. (I refer here only to clients’ future civil actions. I take the wall to be unbreakable in relation to criminal defence.)
Everyone can agree that physical attacks and intimidation are unjustifiable in all circumstances.
But many would argue – climate activists, for instance - that other forms of action against lawyers for the way that they advise their clients in future civil matters is legitimate.
The Law Society is in the middle of a three year ethics programme which has this issue at its heart. Tackling the almost unsolvable conundrum about how lawyers should behave in hotly contested civil areas – for instance, the role of public interest - should clearly be at the forefront of debate.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
7 Readers' comments