The sentencing last week of the man who attacked employees of an immigration law firm in 2020 reminded me that one of the most important events in 2024 for our profession arose out of the threats to various immigration law firms during this summer’s riots. Attacks on solicitors are growing.
I wrote last week about climate activists targeting the office of a City law firm (‘protestors occupied the firm’s lobby, while others sprayed the outside of the building with fake oil’).
The linkage of two qualitatively different events may outrage some, because the reasons behind the two sets of incidents are so different, as is their potential outcome. We may find the motivation behind one good (to save humanity and the planet), with no intention to physically harm any individual lawyer, and the other bad (with the intention to cause serious harm to a section of humanity). I understand that.
But they share the targeting of lawyers and law firms in a way that we have not seen before, pointing to a future where the lawyer is the route to the client and is to be punished for the client’s actions. (Unfortunately, the template was set for them over the last few years by governments, which have increasingly used lawyers as the route to clients, particularly in the area of tax avoidance and money laundering.)
The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) released last week a report on threatening behaviour and aggression towards lawyers, to coincide with Human Rights Day on 10 December.
The UK is not alone in seeing intimidation of immigration lawyers. The CCBE reports that, in Ireland, the recent publication of a targeted article aimed to discredit the work of immigration lawyers resulted in death threats and a campaign of harassment against members of the Irish Immigration Lawyers Association.
Over half of European lawyers responding to the CCBE survey (a self-selecting group) had been the victims of threatening behaviour or aggression at least once over the last two or three years. Much of this was verbal aggression, but harassment, threatening behaviour and physical aggression (which had the lowest incidence) were occurring more frequently. One out of three of the responding lawyers considered leaving the profession at least once because of encounters with such behaviour.
In the land of guns, the US, a trial got underway last month of a man accused of shooting a lawyer on behalf of a litigant friend.
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