Top asylum lawyer accuses solicitors over 'blood money'

Perhaps it was the sunny weather, but this week the press took an unusually positive view of the legal profession.

Joshua Rozenberg in The Telegraph wrote a glowing profile of 'one of the country's most respected' asylum and immigration lawyers, David Burgess of Winstanley Burgess, who 'after 30 years of scratching a living from immigration work, is giving it all up' (29 May).

Mr Burgess, along with the four other partners of Winstanley Burgess, is 'exhausted by fighting to make a living from publicly funded work', and so the firm will close its doors for good at the end of August.

He is exhausted by 'working 13-hour days, plus weekends, and earning about the same as a teacher', and because 'despite the fact that you'll be lucky to make a profit, let alone fund a pension, the media will shamelessly libel you as a legal aid millionaire.'

The article focused on the lesser-seen side of immigration practice, and looked at why lawyers choose to forgo the big salaries in favour of this kind of practice.

'He speaks movingly of clients to whom he has become close...Sukhvinder, the prematurely aged Sikh who always carries his son's suicide note on him; the Indian police turned on his son following Sukhvinder's escape...

the son fathered by the police torturer who raped her.' He downplays the media myth of Britain being 'swamped' by asylum seekers - 'the focus on numbers drowns the voices of genuine suffering, and that 85,000 [last year's number of UK asylum applications] is little more than a cup final crowd.'

He also made a brave stab at de-bunking the popular myth of bogus asylum seekers, stating firmly that 'over 30 years I have not had any such person as a client'.

Instead, he attacked the 'corrupt' solicitors who tell applicants to write their own statements, leading to mistakes that see the applications dismissed.

'Those solicitors are in effect murderers - through greed, they put applicants into an obstacle course they can't survive.

Genuine refugees will then be sent back to face further persecution and even death.

That's money for blood.'

Although the media may have laid off lawyer-bashing for a week, they did not extend such civilities to Home Secretary David Blunkett.

The Independent gleefully reported that 'peers of all parties threatened a five-month guerrilla campaign to rip the heart out of the Home Secretary's plans to overhaul the criminal justice system' (29 May).

One of the most controversial part of Mr Blunkett's plans - to limit the right to trial by jury in complex fraud trails, seen as the thin end of the wedge - look 'doomed in the Lords', and he also faces 'concerted opposition to moves to allow defendants to be tried twice for the same offence and to disclose their previous convictions'.

The Lord Chancellor also looks to be on the receiving end of protests, this time against his Courts Bill, currently arousing the wrath of Rachel Lipscomb, chairwoman of the Magistrates Association and 'an unlikely warrior of local justice' (The Times, 27 May).

Ms Lipscomb, who 'has been on the warpath ever since she was elected', is particularly angry about the unified courts system proposed by the bill, 'which would bring the running of magistrates', crown and county courts together and under the wing of the Lord Chancellor'.

This, according to Ms Lipscomb, would create 'a real threat to local justice and the centuries-old link between justices of the peace and their communities', meaning that 'magistrates would no longer run their own courts'.

Finally, David Pannick QC writes in The Times what many lawyers have been thinking, namely that 'there are more important issues about the future of the legal profession than whether or not lawyers and judges should continue to wear wigs' (27 May).

We are mature enough, he argues, to understand that 'legal authority depends on the quality of the justice on offer, not on whether the judge and the lawyers have some horse hair on their head and a piece of cloth on their back.'

Despite this, he comes out in favour of scrapping the traditional dress - 'all of us are irritated by spending our working life scratching a head made itchy by the head of a long dead horse' - and issues a rallying cry to the legal workers of the world.

'Unite! We have nothing to lose but our manes.'

Victoria MacCallum