We were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect.

Welcome to the Lawmanity podcast, where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that the law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change. I'm Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and activist based in Scotland and your host on the Lawmanity podcast.

This week we're speaking to feminist activist, lawyer and legend Harriet Wistrich. Harriet is the founder and director of the Centre for Women's Justice and a solicitor of 25 years experience who worked for many years with renowned civil liberties Firm Birnberg, Peirce Ltd. She has acted in many high profile cases around violence against women, including on behalf of women who challenged police and parole board in the John Worboys case, women deceived in relationships by undercover police officers, and on behalf of women appealing murder convictions for killing abusive partners, most recently, Sally Challen. She is also a founder member of the campaign group Justice for Women and trustee of the charity the Emma Humphries Memorial Prize. Most recently, Harriet is the author of the 2024 book Sister in Law, a reflection on her most notable cases and what it's like to fight for justice for women in a system designed for men. Welcome to the show again, Harriet, and it's such a pleasure to have you.

Hi. Very pleased to be here. Thank you.

So in this podcast I've been experimenting with a surprise opener question to get us settled and to learn a little more about the people behind the legal legends we're interviewing.

A good friend pointed out to me that our sense of smell is our oldest sense and observed that we can hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories. So if you don't mind, could you please tell me a little bit about a smell that is meaningful for you, maybe one that you just really like or one that's connected to a place or time that you like to bring to mind.

It's a difficult question that, but I would suggest the smell of the seaside. So when you go on a, particularly on a nice bright sunny day to get away from the big smoke down to the seaside and you kind of smell this fresh sea smell and hear the gulls and the, you know, kind of anticipation of that kind of freshness, that's a, a nice smell I associate with getting away from things a little bit.

I love that, I love that kind of grounding with nature and I can actually almost hear as well the sounds that go with that smell. And I Also reflect that, as you know, lawyers and activists spend a lot of time at their desks in meeting rooms and sort of working all hours. It's actually quite a good reminder as well, the importance of stepping away or having a stopping place to go to. So thank you so much for that, Harriet. Turning to the podcast topic for today. So we're here to help listeners understand how the law can be used to achieve really significant change by looking at how you and your colleagues throughout your career have led campaigns to shine a light on the ways in which the criminal justice system has failed to protect women, and in particular, women survivors and victims of violence. So today I'd like to delve a little bit deeper into your role and ask you to tell us a little bit about the start of your journey. Can you explain a bit about how you got involved with this work, what it's about, and what was at stake that made you think that specifically law as a tool or legal intervention is what would be necessary to achieve the change that you were looking for?

Yes, well, I didn't actually start out as a career in the law at all. I was doing other things, exploring other ways of. I guess my main ambition was around political change and feminist activism in particular. So that was my always my big passion. And I wanted to find roots, I suppose, to. To bring about change for. For women in whatever way I could, and kind of explored that a little bit through kind of film and video. Originally that was. That was a route I was exploring. I also, as a feminist activist, would become involved in various different campaigns around issues. One campaign I got involved in in a sort of ad hoc way initially was around the issue of women who kill their abusive partners, violent partners. And it came about because a friend who lived up in the north had seen a TV program called the Provoked Wife, which featured the cases of several women who'd all been convicted of murder and were unable to use the then defense of provocation to argue that their conviction should at the very least be mitigated to manslaughter because of the abuse they've been subjected to, which amounted to provocation. And yet the legal system didn't really that. The legal defense of provocation was really designed much more around a male response to being provoked. So originally it kind of, you know, originates in, you know, almost like men fighting duels and, you know, kind of responding to an insult. It was. That was the sort of, kind of roots really of the provocation defense. And it required a sudden and temporary loss of control to words said or things done and that was the test. And what we saw with these cases was that women who were subjected to abuse and violence over a period were often not able to respond suddenly or to a further act of abuse or fear of abuse, because they knew if they did, they'd come out worse from it anyway. The particular case originally that I got involved with was the case of Sara Thornton, who had killed her husband and been convicted of his murder. And she was appealing his conviction and was very keen to get public support to raise the issues. And our friend just asked a group of us if we could get together quickly to organize a demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice justice to highlight the issue. So we, we kind of called around all our mates and campaigners and stuff and said, look, let's get down to the Court of Appeal, let's make some placards, let's say, you know, that, that domestic violence is provocation, self defense is no offense, these sorts of things. And we all kind of gathered outside the court and we put together some leaflets highlighting the issue and transpired that one of the groups that was also really interested in Sara's case and supporting her case was Southall Black Sisters. And they had been beginning to build up a campaign for another woman called kiranjitalawalia, who was likewise convicted of the murder of her husband in circumstances where she'd suffered horrific abuse. And so what happened with Tahra's case at the Court of Appeal was the Court of Appeal rejected her appeal and two days later there was a report in the news of a man who'd kicked his wife to death when the judge said she would have tried the patience of a saint. And it kind of illustrated everything we had said. And so we kind of thought it. Somehow we got the news interested, we captured the public imagination. Let's do some more campaigning around this. And that's why we formed justice for Women. We then supported and worked alongside South All Black Sisters as they built up their huge campaign around Kiranjita La Walia.

Kiranjit Aluwalia in the black jacket, walked free from the Old Bailey to the jubilant cries of supporters. In 1989, she was convicted of murdering her husband and given a life sentence. Today at a retrial, meanwhile, her plea of manslaughter through diminished responsibility was accepted. Her mental state had been impaired when she set her husband alight with petrol. Mr. Justice Cockhouse decided, I consider justice does not require you to be kept in prison any longer and direct you to be released forthwith. He said, Mrs. Aliwalia broke down and Wept. There were cheers from the public gallery. Later at a news conference, this reaction.

It'S a great shock for me today. I wasn't expecting anything and I'm very pleased. Finally justice has been done for me. And a sort of opportunity partly arose when after Kiranjit Alawaliya's very successful campaign Justice Women received a letter from a young woman in prison called Emma Humphreys who had already been in prison for over seven years, detained at her Majesty's pleasure because she was only 17 at the time of her conviction and was seeking, was now, having given up, was now beginning to seek help to appeal and she wrote to us. We then went to Kiranjit's solicitor Rohit Sangli and said will you take this case on? He said yes, but I need a volunteer. And so I decided to volunteer and I worked with Emma over a number of months to pull together a really detailed statement of her experience and from that we gradually built up grounds of appeal. And during that process which took, you know, two or three years, I decided to do a law conversion course and, and then the legal practice course to become a solicitor. And the timing was quite good because just literally a few days after I'd finished my legal practice course exams I was out outside the Court of Appeal or inside the Court of Appeal when Emma was successfully succeeded in her, her appeal and was released from prison. So that was my kind of quite exciting entrance into becoming a solicitor.

What an incredible start to your legal career. And then fast forward through a number of years in private practice and you and colleagues founded a legal charity, the Centre for Women's Justice. What led you to do that?

Yeah, sure. So I think the Centre for Women's Justice I should say is a legal charity which I kind of founded in 2016 and its aims were to hold the state accountable around violence against women and girls and to challenge discrimination in the criminal justice system. So the reason I decided to establish the charity was that I'd been working after my initial entrance into the legal profession I'd been working for 20 odd years in different legal aid pract but I kind of, aside from doing occasional criminal appeals, I was really specializing in the kind of fairly niche but growing practice of what was known as actions against the police. So looking at ways in which you could hold the police accountable for their failures. Now initially a lot of those sorts of cases that were developing were around wrongful arrests, false imprisonment, people being assaulted by the police and malicious prosecution. Those were the sort of standard types of police actions that were being explored. And you know, I did A number of those and Deaths in custody, etc. Etc. However, because of my pre existing interest in feminism and my contacts with women's movement, occasionally, you know, friends or colleagues in the women's sector would come to me and say, is there anything we can do about, you know, the police just completely failed to investigate this rape case or failed to put in any protections for this victim of domestic violence who was then murdered, whatever those sorts of issues. So it was less about their police over policing and more about the police under policing. And we were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect, to investigate failures of the cps, to prosecute and apply basically the purpose, you know, if one has any belief in policing that, that is for me what policing should be doing. It should be protecting the vulnerable, preventing crime or, you know, investigating and properly holding those accountable for committing crimes. And so that was, that was really the area. And in fact I then became involved in this case involving the serial rapist taxi driver John War Boys. One of the, one of the problems with the desire to hold police accountable for their failures is that the police are in certain English Welsh law and I suspect in Scots law as well, I'm not sure are immune from suit in negligence. So you can't actually sue the police for negligent failures. You can sue them for, you know, kind of causing harm by over policing, but not necessarily for failing to do things. And there'd been a number of attempts to challenge that. I mean the famous case was around the, another violence against women case around the so called Yorkshire Ripper and a case brought by his last victim's family, Jaclyn Hill against West Yorkshire Police. And the court had held very clearly that the police couldn't be held liable under our common law in negligence. So however, since that time we had the advent of the Human Rights act and the Human Rights act passed in force in 2000, basically provides, puts a number of duties on the state, which obviously includes the police, to, you know, protect its citizens. And so what we were exploring and you know, there were other lawyers sort of looking at different routes around that. Could we argue rather than that there was a negligent failure to investigate, that the police failed to comply with their duty to investigate. And that was the case that was eventually evolved and argued around the War Boys case. It was a case called DSD and MPV against the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. And I brought that case on behalf of two women. And interestingly so we did succeed in The High Court and established that under Article 3 of the European Convention, the police do have a duty to conduct an effective investigation into crimes that met the threshold for a violation of Article 3. And that case, amazingly, the police kept appealing it and so eventually went up to the Supreme Court. So we've now got a very clear duty established because we won all the way up. Amazingly, I suppose, through doing that work and then doing other cases around violence against women, you know, it was clear that there were very few lawyers specializing in the right area who could, who could act for women. There's a huge demand for advice and assistance around these sorts of cases. There are a few, one or two other solicitors I knew, but it was a really, really small profession, if you like. So we decided. Well, there was. I decided, I guess, that, you know, we needed a legal charity really to, to take these cases forward. One of the difficulties also, and one of the reasons why I thought of that charity was the way forward, was because of the very limited availability of legal aid to bring such cases. And they're obviously big, complex cases. So because of the limited availability of legal aid, I thought, you know, if we could set up a charity, there might be other ways in which you could bring challenges around that.

That's fascinating. And such a great example of how.

International human rights law can make a.

Real difference for people in their everyday lives. In this case, all of those women who have been let down by police failure to investigate in these troubling cases. So the center was established in 2016. What do you and your team focus on now in the day to day?

A lot of the issues are around those police and other criminal justice failures to protect, to investigate, to prosecute, and to keep safe, I guess. So that's not exclusively the area of work, but that is particularly of interest. But because also of my interest in terms of, you know, like the women who kill, but more generally the issue of victims who are criminalized, you know, because the criminal justice system seems incapable of distinguishing between victims and perpetrators quite often. And, you know, like the women who kill, there are many other cases which we, we do a big project around where women may be cursed into offending or maybe convicted of offenses when really they're the victim. So that, that, that sort of kind of runs alongside the, the, the kind of cases where we're seeking to, to hold the police and others accountable.

Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing, Harriet. So I'm going to bring us to our, our final question for the day, which is sort of on behalf of our listeners who might have tuned in to just learn a bit more about using the law, but also what it looks like to be an activist and a lawyer. Now, there might be someone out there who is a younger version of you who's looking at what you've accomplished today or maybe just, you know, wants to be you. And my question for you is this. What advice might you have for the younger you?

Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to answer that question without taking into account the very different context that younger mes live in. So, you know, the. The area of law that I practice in has, has, has been expanded, you know, considering, not just around violence against women, but around state accountability. But, you know, the. There are many, you know, it's very, very difficult now to get a training contract or, you know, to qualify in a way that, although, you know, it was. Wasn't easy, it seems to be much harder. And now people seem to have to spend quite a bit of time being a paralegal before they can then become a trainee or there's the sqe now, but it does just seem to take a lot longer. And there's all sorts of other issues that, in terms of student debt and various other things that, that make it quite a different situation. So kind of transposing. My experience from 30 years ago to now may not be exactly the same, but what I would say is that it's good to do other things before you go into law. Sometimes it's good to be involved, even if you're studying law straight from the outset, just to. To be involved in other stuff. If the reason you're going into law is because you want to use law as a tool to create change, then you should be connected with people who are looking at change, creating change in different ways and not silo yourself off into being a lawyer. I'm very strong believer in, you know, the benefits of collaborating with others, working in other areas and obviously for the sort of work I do and many, many of you will do, you know, it's a critical part of that is also obviously to listen to and to work alongside those for whom you're acting rather than, you know, to see yourself as some kind of siloed expert, really. So, yeah, I think that, that, that, that's sort of my kind of philosophy. I don't think that would change because of the changed times and contexts. Whilst I recognize that just being able to spend a few years just doing kind of volunteering and activism may be more difficult these days.

Thank you so much, Harriet, for that wisdom and absolutely. I think that that ethos that you outlined about working alongside and with the people who are raising the issues that you are working on is so important. And you've clearly expressed that in your.

Own practice, if anyone is interested as well. I shamelessly plug my book. It tells people a bit about the story of, of how I got into the law and how I fought those particular battles. So yeah, if you're really, if you are really engaged in these issues and you know, you could find out a bit about it, about what it was like and how I approached it.

Absolutely a cracking read and very clear and engaging just as you are in the podcast today.

Thanks so much to you, the listener, for tuning into the lawmanity Podcast. In our next episode we'll be speaking to Andy Searle, Legal Director at Just Right Scotland, about a legal challenge that secured access to further and higher education for potentially thousands of young people in Scotland. Tune in to hear how an aspiring doctor and a student led campaign successfully established a right to education in human rights law for migrant young people in Scotland and expanded access to further studies for everyone who follows in their footsteps. If you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how the law really works in practice and how it can be used to make the world a better and brighter place. Our podcast has been generously supported by a grant from the the Clark foundation for Legal Education. The lawmanity Podcast is co produced by me, your host Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you've been listening to is Always on the Move by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.