In certain quarters this won’t go down well…
Roll on Friday
A law firm has revealed it is acting for Hamas and has applied to have the terrorist organisation removed from the UK government’s list of proscribed groups.
Riverway Law, a two-man immigration firm based in Streatham, posted a clip on X of Principal Solicitor Fahad Ansari delivering the firm’s hopeful tome to the Home Office, accompanied by barristers Daniel Grütters of One Pump Court and Franck Magennis of Garden Court.
The slomo hero walk was a choice.
Riverway Law begins its application with the accusation that, “For more than a century, the British State has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine”.
It states that Hamas is simply “an organised resistance movement that exercises the right of the Palestinian people to resist Zionism and the colonisation, occupation, apartheid and, genocide carried out in its name”.
The firm goes on to defend Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis on 7 October 2023 on the basis that fighting back against the “Zionist State” “by all available means, including armed struggle” is “moral, legitimate and explicitly enshrined in international law”.
Weirdly, the stunt attracted a heated response from thousands of people, among them shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick. He said the firm’s acceptance of instructions from Hamas was “sickening”.
Defending Riverway’s position on X, Ansari wrote that “The public reaction over the past 24 hours demonstrates a great degree of misunderstanding and ignorance of the law”.
“If parliament intended to allow proscribed groups to legally apply for deproscription, it should not shock members of the public, especially members of parliament, that a group has sought to utilise the mechanism to do so”, he said.
He also argued that lawyers should not be associated with their clients or their clients’ causes “as a result of discharging their functions, precisely because it endangers lawyers for carrying out their duties”.
Although in this instance, Ansari’s views appear to be quite closely aligned with those of his client. A commenter on X pointed out that the firm’s profile image on the platform was until very recently a man whose face was hidden with a keffiyeh standing in front of a banner which stated, “END ZIONIST CONTROL OF THE UK GOVERNMENT”, until it was replaced with a less incendiary image.
In a justificatory thread, Ansari confirmed the firm wasn’t being paid by Hamas as it would be illegal due to the group’s proscribed status.
He also referred to the IDF’s ongoing military pounding of Palestine. Claiming that Riverway has been contacted by “about a dozen budding law students interested in working with our firm on such landmark legal challenges”, the solicitor said the support the firm had received since unveiling “The Hamas Case” showed that “the British public are tired of seeing images of dead Palestinian children on our screens every day and are desperate for a political solution irrespective of their views on either Hamas or Israel”.
One commenter responded that it was “such a long way to say ‘I support Hamas’”.
Ansari told ROF, “There should not be any controversy over an organisation instructing lawyers to bring an application for its removal from the list of proscribed organisations in accordance with a procedure approved by parliament”.
“The fact that there is suggests that many are uncomfortable with the concept of due process and the rule of law. This manifests itself in articles that seek to malign the lawyers instructed by the organisation in question.”
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/law-firm-makes-bid-legalise-hamas
