Who? Amit Sachdev, 32-year-old assistant solicitor at north London firm Sheikh & Co, who specialises in human rights and immigration work.

Why is he in the news? Represented Mrs Tilki, a Turkish national who was one of three claimants in test cases in which the High Court declared that Home Office rules - designed to prevent sham marriages - infringed human rights because they discriminated against those outside the Church of England. The case was the first before the English courts that tested article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to marry and found a family. Mr Justice Stephen Silber said the rules - which require immigrants who have only six months permission to be in the UK, to obtain permission from the Home Office if they wish to marry anywhere other than an Anglican church - breached the ECHR on grounds of nationality and religion and were therefore incompatible with the Human Rights Act 1998. The secretary of state was granted permission to appeal and has suspended dealing with all applications to marry under the scheme.


Background: Law degree and legal practice course at De Montfort University, Leicester, followed by a postgraduate certificate in corporate law at Nottingham Trent University. He trained at Leicester firm Acharyas, and moved to his present firm upon qualification in 1999.


Route to the case: 'A large number of our clients are Kurdish and we had acted for this client's family in the past.'


Thoughts on the case: 'Sections 19 to 25 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004 were the first time that any government had involved itself in restricting the right of a consenting adult to marry. However, the measures only applied to immigrants and even then only to immigrants who did not wish to marry in the Church of England. The House of Lords complained that the Act had not received proper scrutiny. By this judgment their concerns were proved correct. I hope that this decision will cause the government to think more carefully about legislation which clearly impacts on fundamental rights without it being properly debated in Parliament.'


Dealing with the media: 'I have previously dealt with the media so I was aware of how to deal with them. Unfortunately, there is a lot of anti-immigration press in the UK and this legislation is a typical example of legislation rushed through by a government bowing to tabloid pressure. There was a 50-50 split in the manner in which the press covered this case; some were supportive, but others were hostile - they criticised the judgment and even talked about scrapping the Human Rights Act.'