Solicitors have joined forces with barristers to speak out over the contempt proceedings faced by silk Rajiv Menon – describing the court’s decision as ‘chilling’ and an attack on free speech.
At an event this week organised by Garden Court North, Garden Court, One Pump Court and Nexus, speakers from across the legal sector spoke of their concern about next week’s High Court proceedings.
Peter Weatherby KC, who chaired the webinar, said: ‘For the first time ever in this jurisdiction, a lawyer is facing criminal trial for what he said in his closing speech to a jury. Wholly unprecedented here, but in my experience not uncommon in certain other jurisdictions – authoritarian ones. It represents a very dark turn for the rule of law here.’
Menon, called in 1993, is accused of misleading the jury and ignoring the judge’s directions during his closing speech in a criminal trial. He was representing one of six Palestine Action activists accused of breaking into the Elbit Systems Factory near Bristol, causing an estimated £1m of damage. None of the defendants was convicted. Following a retrial, a jury found four of the defendants, including Menon’s client Charlotte Head, guilty of criminal damage.
Last month, Mr Justice Johnson determined that Menon should face summary proceedings for contempt. Menon is appealing the order, but the Gazette understands the hearing listed for next week is going ahead as planned.
Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former shadow attorney general, said ‘the rule of law should protect fundamental human rights, that includes the right to a fair trial and the representation of your choice’, adding: ‘Courts should be fair, [it was] in my view…crystal clear that both those principles, those golden rules that are part of the rule of law, have been violated - graphically violated in this case for everyone to see’.
She added: ‘In recent years, we’ve seen so many attacks on civil liberties, on lawyers, on judges, on the rule of law. But normally they’ve come from the executive. How more difficult, unsettling and delicate to handle when the threats come from within the judiciary itself. It is my view that judges have behaved capriciously in this case in a very chilling manner.
‘There is no rule of law, there is no right to a fair trial if lawyers are to be treated in this way.’
Criminal Bar Association chair Riel Karmy Jones KC alluded to the 'number of tales of barristers across different parts of the country that we have heard of, barristers changing their speeches or being told to change them, including in cases where no direction has been given by a judge.
‘That really can’t be ignored. People at the criminal bar have become uncertain and scared of what they can and can’t say. Scared that somehow they might be, at the end of a trial where they have faithfully represented their client themselves, facing a charge of criminal contempt and also through some unknown and novel procedure.
‘What is really an enormous concern is how this is impacting how criminal barristers feel able to do their job and how well they do it.’
Solicitor Raju Bhatt, co-founder of Bhatt Murphy, described the contempt proceedings brought against Menon as a ‘wholly unjustified and unacceptable attack’.
He added that proceedings were an ‘attack on the jury system on which this client of Rajiv’s, this particular defendant sought to rely – the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions. What Rajiv did here was nothing more and nothing less than the job he was required to do for his client in accordance with his duties and pursuant to the rule of law’.
Solicitor Jane Deighton of DPG, who has previously instructed Menon, described the criminal proceedings against him as ‘Kafkaesque’.
Menon said he had been ‘completely overwhelmed and humbled by the enormous support’ he had received from lawyers, non-lawyers and ‘complete strangers’.
