We were one of the first groups that was saying there were problems with miscarriages of justice,' says Liberty's 42-year-old legal director, John Wadham.'People who slogged day in, day out on cases like the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, in the early 1990s suddenly found the media were interested - and journalists started banging at our door for more cases.'Following the release of the Birmingham Six in March 1991, and the setting up of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, Liberty came up with a list of 110 more convictions about which it was concerned.

There was a real sense that past injustices would be righted and never repeated.'Then, for some reason I don't unders tand, half way through the Royal Commission's deliberations, the press seemed no longer to be talking about miscarriages of justice, and were instead talking about a rise in crime,' Mr Wadham says, adding darkly: 'Why that happened and who was involved in that I just don't know - but there was for a few months a window of opportunity for human rights and civil rights in this country.' It was lost.By the time of Home Secretary Michael Howard's 27-point speech to a decidedly blood-curdling 1993 Conservative Party conference, a get-tough-on-crime policy juggernaut had been unleashed and no one had bothered to check the brakes were working.'Howard says a lot of things that sound like they are doing something about crime levels, but they are not.

For instance, the right to silence - the evidence from Northern Ireland is that conviction rates haven't been increased by restrictions put in place there,' he says.

'And burglars are not going to stop burgling because the right to silence has been abolished.'Mr Wadham also derides Mr Howard's cultivated sarcasm about defence lawyers making money on the back of the criminal process, when the new restrictions on the right to silence are widely tipped to lead to lengthy - and costly for the public purse - court deliberations over what inferences can be drawn from a suspect's refusal to answer police questions.But his aspersions are not reserved for Conservative politicians.'There's a problem with the Labour Party too,' he says.

'The difficulty with Tony Blair's approach is that once Labour had decided to be the party of law and order, the Tories decided they could trump that with ease by bringing in all the Draconian provisions of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill.''That put the Labour Party in a really difficult position because it had said it wanted to be tough on crime, had shunted the Tories further to the right and was disabled from arguing on principles.'A native of south-east London, Mr Wadham studied sociology at the London School of Economics in the early 1970s before working in a psychiatric hospital and working as a social worker.His first contact with the law came as he did placements in law centres during an MSc course in applied social studies.Then, through the 1980s, he worked with law centres in Wandsworth (whose fortunes were under constant threat from the vagaries of local government finance) and gained expertise in housing and social security law, taking one case as far as the House of Lords.In 1985 he went part-time to do the graduate law conversion course and the Law Society finals thereafter.

He began articles with BM Birnberg & Co - home to Gareth Peirce and Paul Boateng - and qualified in 1989.Nearly a year passed at Birnbergs handling civil cases, medical negligence, housing and some inquests before he and Ben Birnberg acted as McKenzie friends to Michael Randall and Patrick Pottle, the two men accused of helping a jailbreak by George Blake.

The two were acquitted, having defended themselves with the help of QCs Geoffrey Robertson and Anthony Scrivener.'I wasn't sure I wanted to stay working in private practice - because when I was at the law centres I saw the virtues of combining policy campaigning and case work,' he reflects.He joined Liberty, then the National Council for Civil Liberties, in April 1990 and is now its legal director and relishing it.Much of Liberty's work is centred on test cases, like the Court of Appeal win that secured the right for poll tax refuseniks to be aided by McKenzie friends in the magistrates' courts, and a landmark action against the government in the European Court of Justice - Thynne Wilson and Gunnell v UK - which culminated in the setting up of panels to review periodically the discretionary life sentences of those convicted for offences such as manslaughter, attempted murder, rape, buggery and arson.A specialism is Liberty's pursuit of cases before the European Commission, and Court of Human Rights.'One of the things that people don't realise is that we do casework.

We are obviously very selective, but we do take cases, and we can act for free,' he says.'But the difficult thing with being a broad based civil liberties-human rights organisation is that there is always too much to do.

We get 60 to 100 letters a week asking for information, advice, support, and for us to take people's cases, so I'm afraid to say a lot of the time we are saying no to people we can't help, and that's unfortunate.'