The Very Model of a Dodgy Human Rights Lawyer

Sometimes a mundane event can carry an important symbolic moral and political meaning. The headline in today’s Law Society Gazette, “Dishonest Shiner Struck Off”, at one level refers to just one more case of a grubby little ambulance-chasing shyster lawyer being banned from practising because he had dishonestly touted for business.

But Phil Shiner was no ordinary crooked lawyer. He was a left-wing icon. He was one of Britain’s leading “heroic” human rights lawyers, a committed socialist who had devoted his career to exposing and inventing the “wrongdoings” of British soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The liberal Left establishment stood up for him almost to the very end, saying that he was the victim of a conspiracy between the army, the Ministry of Defence and the right-wing press. What will they say now that he has been utterly discredited by an impartial solicitors’ disciplinary tribunal after a thorough investigation by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority? We can now see that he had systematically breached the fundamental rules designed to safeguard fairness and justice. The Left have serious egg on faces for having defended a proven scoundrel in such an extreme way. It is one more instance of the closed-mindedness of the Left, one more illustration of the authoritarian liberal personality in action. Leftists are like the sheep in Animal Farm: Progressive lawyers good! Army bad! Baaaaa-aa!

Let us begin with the Al-Sweady Inquiry, set up in 2009 to investigate accusations of torture, mutilation and murder against British soldiers who had been serving in Iraq several years before. After five years of deliberation the inquiry, which had cost £25 million, concluded that the allegations were “wholly without foundation and entirely the product of deliberate lies and ingrained hostility”. The accused soldiers were described as having served with exemplary courage and professionalism. The law firm at the centre of the spurious allegations was PIL, Public Interest Lawyers, Phil Shiner’s outfit, which had received well over £3 million of taxpayers’ money to enable it to press false claims of atrocities. But the main reason why the dishonest Shiner acted as he did was political fanaticism; he hated his own society. He was a vice-president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, some of whose members had praised Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s.

Shiner paid an Iraqi tout and fixer very handsomely to round up claimants for him by knocking on doors. Not surprisingly the smell of compensation induced many Iraqis to bear false witness, as it had also done with other very poor people in Afghanistan and Kenya, who had made false claims against British soldiers when put up to it by dodgy human rights lawyers. Iraq has a popular culture of dishonesty brought about by the need to survive under the vicious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and following many centuries of oppression under the Turkish Ottoman empire. Shiner cynically exploited this cultural weakness, though I have no doubt that if it had been explicitly pointed out to him what they were like he would have screamed “Racism!” and turned it into one more part of his dishonest case. When Shiner knew he was going to be investigated by his own profession he induced his Iraqi fixer to change his evidence. In the offices of another human rights firm involved in the scandal crucial files were shredded.

The Al-Sweady Inquiry revealed to the world that Shiner’s firm lacked integrity. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said with feeling about Shiner that he had been involved in a “shameful attempt to use our legal system to attack and falsely impugn our armed forces”. In 2015 the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, ordered his officials to send a dossier to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority based on evidence collected by the Ministry of Defence. It was at this point that the left-wing human rights elite jumped to Shiner’s defence and revealed their bias and malice. Gordon Nardell QC of the Bar Council’s EU Law Committee declared, “Cameron is playing a dangerous game—demonising lawyers who act for politically unpopular clients or causes is worthier of Putin’s Russia than British democracy.” Professor Bill Bowring of the Bar’s Human Rights Committee added: “I think the present government’s attacks on him [Shiner] are outrageous and would not be out of place in Putin’s Russia.” But Mr Cameron neither had nor had sought any powers to deal with Shiner, and the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority is a body completely independent of the government and known for its integrity. I doubt whether Vladimir Putin would permit an independent body of this kind to operate unhindered in Russia. Are these vociferous critics of Cameron now prepared to say that Shiner’s being ignominiously kicked out of his profession is shameful demonisation, rather than the exposure of a scoundrel?

Dame Helena Kennedy, in a piece of pompous rhetoric worthy of Shakespeare on a bad day with a hangover, added, “I would rather a dedicated determined lawyer occasionally got it wrong than see the legal profession bullied into passivity so that power can strut its stuff with impunity.” She was wrong on all counts. Shiner certainly had done some good work in the past, as in the case of Baha Mousa, but he had got it wrong not occasionally but again and again and again. In addition to Al-Sweady he had lied on BBC television about a supposed secret detention centre in Afghanistan, a mini-Guantanamo. The centre was not secret, and the Taliban prisoners were being held there only because Shiner’s firm had blocked their transfer to the custody of the Afghan authorities, who are rumoured to treat their political opponents rather harshly. I also suspect, though I cannot prove it, that Shiner was connected to other law firms involved in the mendacious claims made against British soldiers in Kenya.

The reason why tall-poppy Shiner had to be cut down was not because he had thumbed his nose at the Ministry of Defence but because his actions had led to the unjust treatment of particular named British servicemen. Soldiers have rights too, Dame Helena. They are individual human beings, not mere robotic strutters for the state. These men had experienced the danger and fear of a war against terrorists and insurgents who fought by no rules. The soldiers may not have always kept strictly to the regulations but these are matters to be settled by courts martial, by men who have themselves experienced the stress of war and who have the experience to interpret the facts they are given. The sufferings of the veterans who have had to live under the cloud of false accusations have been utterly neglected by the Shinerites.

Shiner is now complaining that he has received death threats. Does he think that he alone feels threatened? One accused veteran living in Britain, whose name had been publicly revealed, changed his route to work every day and checked his car for bombs before turning on the ignition, lest he become the victim of an attack by violent Muslims.

Shiner will likely be prosecuted for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and end up in jail. Sir Julian Brazier, the MP for Canterbury, wants him tried for treason. Other firms of human rights lawyers will now be thoroughly investigated and disgraced. It is clear to many in Parliament that the Iraq Historic Allegations Team is not fit for purpose and many senior parliamentarians are calling for it to be scrapped; it was only set up because of pressure from a foreign judicial body. After Brexit the country is in a mood to defy such courts as the US has done, or at least derogate from particular clauses.

In a different context I have studied in detail cases brought in another of these courts, the European Court of Human Rights (nothing to do with the EU). It is clear to me that its judges do not merely interpret its founding document. They make up new human rights as they go along and are answerable to no one. It is an exercise in arbitrary power. Even though the Court cannot enforce its rulings Britain, unlike other countries, has rushed to implement them because our elite cares more about its image abroad than about decent common sense and the wellbeing of its own citizens. But that is now going to change. In particular Brexit means that the “rights” imposed by the EU’s European Court of Justice will be voided. We as a sovereign free people will keep only those rights that we want. In addition the foreign-linked Human Rights Act will be repealed and replaced by a British Bill of Rights.

What the human rights obsessives cannot see is that human rights are simply a means for achieving other ends. In countries where human rights are securely established and respected such as Australia or Britain individuals enjoy a degree of freedom and security unknown in Iran or Turkey where they are not. This was true in Britain and Australia in 1970 in the pragmatic era before the beginning of the present elephantiasis of rights, which has often been the result of decisions made outside our countries.

The fallacy peddled by our human rights fanatics is that because human rights are worthwhile a democratic society will always benefit from every new increment of rights backed up by ever more resources. It won’t. The loss in the ability of the state to defend us against terror or serious crime or to maintain effective armed forces or to curb unwanted immigration, all powers that benefit our people, often outweighs in importance the supposed benefits from some new tranche of rights slipped in by a “creative” interpretation of the law. At the margin rights are not sacred. Yet curiously my longing for full freedom of speech along the lines of the US First Amendment is always blocked by the leftists. Human rights law is simply politics by other means.

Justice and rights are not of infinite value, quite simply because we do not have infinite resources. Like all public goods, rights carry an opportunity cost. The tens, possibly hundreds, of millions wasted on the Iraq inquiries, and not just the fraudulent sums stashed away by Shiner, could have been better spent elsewhere, as on better social care for the physically or mentally afflicted or on the proper financing of legal aid for ordinary defendants in court where there is no political dimension. Come to that, why do these historic investigations, not subject to any statute of limitations, always target our veterans rather than former terrorists and insurgents? The allocation of resources by legal institutions is a hidden and unaccountable piece of politics.

A little-known fact about Shiner is that he was a talented stand-up comedian. So let us end this whole horrid story on a humorous note. In July 2012 Shiner was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Kent, in Canterbury. At the award ceremony a singularly unctuous, indeed almost emetic, oration was given by a Professor Nick Grief, part of whose own research concerns the right of “conscientious objection to the payment of taxes for military purposes”. What a very important right! Can we all withhold our taxes if they are used to fund something we do not like? Professor Grief began his eulogy:

It is fitting that we are near the spot where, in 1170, Thomas Becket, that turbulent priest, was murdered by four knights who believed that Henry II wanted him out of the way. For there are those who, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, have wanted to be rid of Phil Shiner: a radical, campaigning, strategic lawyer with an old-fashioned approach to Christian socialism, for whom challenging the abuse of power is a vocation. There may even be something prophetic about his determination to “tell it as it is”, without fear or favour.

Good grief! “Those” have since got rid of St Philip of Shiner, that radical socialist who never failed to “tell it as it is”, before he could even be beatified.

Until recently you could peruse Grief’s entire sickening spiel on the University of Kent’s website. If you click on it today, you get: “The URL you requested could not be found. The page you requested no longer exists.” Shades of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the electronic equivalent of air-brushing out of history the face of a member of the Soviet Politburo since fallen from grace who had been present in the original Politburo group portrait. The university does not seem to have worked out that ghostly versions still exist out there in cyberspace to be chuckled over and copied by determined seekers after the truth. “Great Neptune’s ocean … the multitudinous seas incarnadine” cannot wash away metaphorical egg on face. According to the Chichester Observer, the University of Kent is now considering stripping Shiner of his doctorate. Will there be a degradation ceremony in which his gown is slashed to ribbons, his floppy hat trampled into the mud and his degree certificate burned in front of him? Or will we merely learn of the event from a kindly prison warder who had once served in the SAS?