 Good evening everybody. My name is Michael Hanley and I am the Senior Partner in Wilson Cilistus. It is my very great privilege to welcome you all here tonight, for the inaugural K-Everett Memorial Lecture and Prize Giving ceremony. We will shortly be commencing our evening with the prize presentation, to be followed by a lecture delivered by Martha Martha Spurrier, director of liberty. There will be an opportunity for questions and comments and the formal part of the evening will be concluded with closing remarks by Professor Carol Tan, head of the SOAS School of Law. The formal part of the evening will be followed by a drinks reception in the Brunei suite upstairs at street level and we very much hope that you will all be able to join us for that part of the evening. We would particularly like any student guests to come and join that gathering. We believe greatly that we can benefit from academic students and practicing lawyers mingling. We have established a series of lectures in Cays memory, which will take place annually over the coming years. The memorial event will have an associated prize which will be awarded to the very best dissertation in a SOAS Masters module course of study with a human rights aspect. I believe that there are in the region of a hundred dissertations eligible for the award, which is a very significant body of study on human rights. The memorial prize is awarded to the dissertation with the very highest academic mark finalised by the postgraduate board of examiners. Kay herself believed in training the next generation. She was a superb mentor, patient and generous with her knowledge and experience. She had a special bond with her trainee solicitors and her case workers. I remember her remarking at one time quite late in her illness. Michael, I just want to get back to carry on bossing my trainees around. That feeling I'm sure was very much reciprocated. I know that the people who were fortunate enough to be trained by Kay hold her in particularly high regard. I'm sure that Kay would very much have approved of an award designed to encourage and inspire students at the early stages of their career. I would very much like to thank SOAS for their collaboration and enormous support in bringing the Kay Everett memorial event to fruition. Kay was a student at SOAS in 2004 where she did an LLM in international human rights law. Her master's studies at SOAS were a very important part in her transition from a commercial solicitor in practice in the city to the passionate human rights work that she undertook in various organisations, but ultimately from 2008 in Wilson's solicitors. Kay became a partner in 2012 and she made a fantastic contribution to our firm with her boundless enthusiasm, inventive legal thinking and absolute empathy with work that we all do. It was an enormous sadness for the entire firm and for the wider community of immigration activists when Kay passed away in 2016 succumbing to a hard fought battle with cancer at the very young age of only 43. So our memorial evening is in recognition and sincere appreciation of Kay's contribution to the practice of immigration law. I'm sure that the memorial lectures over the years will stimulate thought and reflection and indeed action in the field of human rights and especially refugee and migrant rights. I'm particularly pleased that Kay's father has been able to join us this evening. Ryan has travelled particularly to the UK for this event and Ryan you are extremely welcome. Kay's partner Annand is now going to make the presentation to the very first prize winner, Eda Sehan. So I would like to call on Annand to make the presentation. Thank you Annand. Thank you Michael. So Kay really enjoyed her time at SOAS studying for masters in international human rights. She found it a particularly exciting place to study given its focus on an area of the world which was very important to her. She also worked hard as she was a mature student and it was part of her journey from the city to immigration and public law. Those of you who knew Kay will not be surprised to know that she set up a study group with like-minded, hard-working students to ensure they were disciplined and progressed when she was at SOAS. I'm sure that she and her study group would have competed hard to win this prize had it been available back then and we're very grateful to SOAS and Michael and his colleagues at Wilson's for arranging such a fitting way to remember Kay. Given this it gives me great pleasure to congratulate Eda on winning the inaugural Kay Everitt Memorial Prize for the best human rights dissertation on a SOAS Masters. Eda has made a similar journey to that which Kay took from the city and her dissertation considers the new temporary exclusion orders and reminds us that it's sometimes necessary to challenge the very premise of new legislative measures which are proposed rather than only critiquing them from a human rights perspective. Given the continuing never-ending proposals for further counter-terrorism legislation I'm sure this approach is going to be one that continues to be both relevant and important. So it gives me great pleasure to invite Eda here. Congratulations Eda. Challenging unlawful detention and securing bail was at the heart of Kay's practice and a most important aspect of our work. Kay was involved in establishing our public law co-establishing with James Elliott, our public law department in 2012. She shared a passionate commitment to exposing injustice by bringing cases and it was her day-to-day work as a lawyer that very much underpinned her authority to speak out on behalf of the voiceless, which is nearly me. The indefinite detention of immigrants is simply an outrage. It is unacceptable. It's a stain on our civil liberties as is the endemic level of migrant detention running at something like 27,000 people a year. Unlike a custodial sentence where the prisoner counts down the days to generally known release dates, an immigration detainee counts the days upwards, never knowing when he or she will be released. It is extremely fitting that Kay's first memorial lecture has the title, It's About Time, ending the tragedy of indefinite immigration detention. So without further ado I have the enormous pleasure of calling on Martha Spurrier, director of Liberty, to deliver the inaugural Kay Everett memorial lecture. Thank you Martha. Thank you, thank you all. It's a real honour, like a real honour to be giving this lecture tonight. Kay was a really inspirational lawyer and inspirational campaigner and I think one of the things I've been thinking about when thinking about this evening is how it's incumbent on all of us to reflect how we can aspire to be more like her, to be held accountable to her ideals and to carry on the very important work that she did and that I know so many of you in this room do. So as Michael has said tonight I want to reflect on something that Kay and I shared and that I expect many of you share and that is a very deep sadness and a really profound anger about the practice in this country of locking up migrants indefinitely. It is to my mind a practice that is the worst human rights abuse that happens on these shores and the fact that it is done in our names every day belittles all of us. But before getting on to detention I just wanted to pause and think a little bit about lawyers or think about lawyers like Kay because lawyers are not really known for their humility and Barrister's pet particularly. But actually I think that the very best lawyers are truly humble people. I think that they are lawyers who like Kay and like many of you know that but for the grace of whatever higher power you believe in if anyone we're all the same as our clients and it's only accidents of circumstance that separate us and that we are not superior and we are not important and that it's not about the lawyer it's never about the lawyer the lawyer is not the important one. And of course not that far from here stands the burnt out remains of Grenfell Tower which I think for all of us is this very dark icon of the injustices and the inequalities that still run pretty deep in this first world country and I think it's a tragic reminder if you've been passed that tower if you've driven past it on the west way it's a tragic reminder that even those very basic rights still have to be fought for and it's a monument really to what happens when rights are disregarded but perhaps you know in less legalistic language when human life is treated cheaply and I think we would do very well to remember every day that we are not so different from those people and that you might have a different life to me or hold a different passport or speak a different language or pray to a different God but pretty much our hopes and our fears are one like everyone who lives in a tower block we want to sleep safely in our beds we want our families to be protected we want to be free to protest and resist and dissent and I think the best lawyers lawyers like Kay really know this I think they know that they're not very far from being the survivor of the fire or the immigration detainee and that that distance between them and their clients is something to feel profoundly grateful for profoundly conscious of and that it's about being aware that it's that distance that enables us as lawyers to try and do something about the injustice or the intolerance or the abuse that many of our clients will faced and so tonight as we spend a bit of time thinking about immigration detention and the enormity of what we're doing to people in those removal centres I think we have a bit of an obligation to feel optimistic about it we have a bit of an obligation to feel like we get to still be here and we get to carry on this fight it's a real privilege to do this kind of work and I think if we can keep at it and if we can keep hopeful and keep hold of our humility then we will be able to do something that Kay would be proud of that will genuinely make a difference and that in the process of being part of that will make all of our lives richer there's a brilliant quote I'm not going to go down kind of literary ways but there's a great quote from my literary hero who's a man called David Foster Wallace and he wrote beautifully about the nature of freedom and he said there are all different kinds of freedom and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and effort and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day that is real freedom and that I think is the freedom that we should all be aspiring to to caring about other people sacrificing for other people in myriad ways every day just like legal aid lawyers do all the time and to my mind caring about people in detention sacrificing something for them is a pretty noble place to start so I don't imagine that there's anyone in this room who doesn't know what immigration detention is although one of the really striking things for me over the past couple of years of doing my job at liberty has been the number of people who have no idea what immigration detention is and not not because they're ignorant or apathetic people but because you can be a pretty right thinking engaged person and you can still not know very much about this quite well kept secret that is behind high walls and razor wire and of course there's a context to everything and there's a reason why sometimes some secrets are easier to keep and I think it's worth standing back and reflecting on how we treat our migrants generally not just what we're doing in those detention centres it was once said that you should judge a society by how it treats its prisoners I actually think now in 2018 we should also be judged by how we treat our immigrants and I think we would be judged harshly in the UK we're one of the only countries in Europe that doesn't have a written strategy on refugee integration you'll remember it was a while ago now but you'll remember that during the refugee crisis the rhetoric used by politicians was pretty astonishingly poisonous those people who were of course seeking sanctuary were referred to as floods and swarms and invasions so much so that the UN felt compelled to intervene condemning our politicians as xenophobic and calling out grossly excessive language and of course under David Cameron and continuing under Theresa May although I don't think any of us are naive enough to think that this kind of policy is the prevail of only one political party but under David Cameron and continuing under Theresa May the Conservative Party has introduced a whole raft of policies again no doubt familiar to many of you that are designed to criminalise and penalise and isolate migrants and those measures are far reaching you know there's a group in Parliament that meets regularly and they're from all different departments and the point of their meeting is to think of new and creative ways that they can make life for migrants really difficult in this country and so we've seen measures making it a criminal offence to drive a car if you're a undocumented migrant making it an offence if you don't declare your nationality on arrest making it a requirement that you declare your nationality at the outset of your criminal trial stopping undocumented migrants from renting properties and opening bank accounts orders used to prohibit rough sleeping and what's often called aggressive begging whatever that means swinging cuts to asylum support for those applying for refugee status and of course not so long ago those deeply offensive go home vans patrolling the streets of London and many of these measures have seen ordinary citizens coopted as border guards we have seen bankers and landlords and nurses and midwives and teachers forced into being complicit in an agenda that puts immigration control above everything that brings the border in country makes life miserable for migrants here and tries to send the signal to the rest of the world that you very much shouldn't try and come to this country not withstanding that of course we are the fifth largest economy in the world the government's name for this suite of policies is the hostile environment policy and again all of you will remember that after the EU referendum there was a really frightening spike in hate crime at rose by about 187% that spike is part of a even more depressing story in a way I promise you this whole talk is not just going to be really depressing but you know there's an arc which so it's that spike is part of a pretty depressing narrative which has seen year-on-year growth in hate crime and overwhelmingly after the referendum the hate crimes were racially motivated hate crimes now we don't know whether they were xenophobic hate crimes we don't record that as separate but we can assume given what was happening at the time that probably lots of that hate crime was motivated by assumptions about where people were from and whether they had a right to be here one thing that struck me when that was happening you you may remember eventually Amber Rudd had to make a statement because this hate crime was ballooning in our communities and she in her statement condemned and I quote the climate of hostility towards migrants on our streets and I read that and reflected on her choice of language and thought to myself you know you reap what you sow because language and policy making that rhetoric that hostile environment at the very top on some level even if it's subconscious gives license to some people to act out on their worst prejudices and I think perhaps one of the most distressing examples of this in recent months which seem to break through a bit into the public consciousness was the woman who reported a rape and then was arrested at a refuge for an immigration offence and taken to a detention centre and as a woman as a feminist as a human being as a taxpayer who's supposed to have policing by consent I was utterly appalled by that it's not the kind of policing that I want done in my name I don't want immigration offences taking priority over serious sexual offences and I feel pretty sickened by the hypocrisy of a home secretary and a prime minister who love nothing more than to talk about their commitment to the modern slavery agenda and yet of course if women can't come forward and report crimes knowing of course that many of those women if they have been trafficked here will have unsettled immigration status if they can't have a pathway to justice and accountability then that agenda is completely hollow I touch on those things because I do think it's an important and illuminating context for immigration detention because in one way immigration detention is the very hardest edge of all of those attitudes of all of those policies I think if we didn't have those attitudes and we didn't have those policies I'm not sure we would tolerate detention as we do every day when I first started working as a barrister I did bail applications for bid the wonderful charity that provides pro bono support for detainees who are applying for bail in the tribunal and you know everyone will have a story like mine I have no ownership over this story because it is so ubiquitous but I represented a man in a bail hearing who had been detained for over three years and he'd gone into detention healthy and again you know a tale as oldest time he over that time detention had destroyed his mental health and we you know I wrote this kind of detailed skeleton argument and felt I think it really was the first time I felt very passionately that there was a real injustice happening and that I really wanted to put an end to it but also felt that I knew that if on that day bail wasn't granted a little bit of my faith in the system would fall away and would be pretty hard to restore and he didn't get bail and he didn't get bail because he didn't have a surety so no one was there to put money up to guarantee that he wouldn't have scond and it was the first time not the last time in these hearings but it was the first time that I could not hold back the tears in the courtroom I couldn't get out of the room before I started crying and a barrister outside court who I now know is Allison pick up who I then became a much loved colleague at Delta Street but outside court came over to me and said have you just been doing a bail hearing I said yes um and you know she knew the story she'd done the bail hearings she knew I didn't have to go through the sob story for her to understand that sense of injustice so she sort of gave me tissues and bought me a cup of tea and sent me on my way um but it's astonishing to me that that story is so mundane I practiced as a lawyer you know across a range of areas and I came across a lot of injustice you know I did inquests into deaths in custody actions against the police a whole range of bad news stories and no question there was some pretty shocking stuff but there was nothing I ever did nothing I ever did where I came across systemically real abuses of power real injustice and something that fundamentally felt like it was the creature of a really broken immoral system as when I was doing immigration detention cases so as Michael said last year 27,000 people locked up in these removal centres and of course so important to be really clear that these people are not serving sentences of imprisonment they are not there because they have committed a crime and their detention is at the whim of the executive it's not been authorised by a judge many of them will never see the inside of a courtroom and so they're held there all 27,000 of them for the administrative convenience of the home office and they of course include pregnant women and victims of trafficking and torture and people with serious mental and physical health problems or who develop those health problems because of detention they include children contrary to the promise to stop detaining children they include families they include people seeking or people who have sought asylum in fact that's the biggest group of people that find themselves in detention and I had a striking moment whenever it was that there was a protest outside Downing Street about the Muslim ban Trump's Muslim ban when Theresa May had gone on her visit and been slow to condemn it and I was walking actually wasn't going to the protest which is terrible but I was walking in the direction of the protest and I ended up walking along with a couple who were headed there and they were saying it's so outrageous that Donald Trump is detaining migrants outside airports I mean it's just I can't believe and they were you know very genuinely and authentically horrified by what they had been reading about you know lawyers sitting in airports writing pleadings to get these people out of detention and these were two British people and I said you know we've been doing that here for years 27,000 people a year detained not far from airports because of the home office and they had no idea and you know those conversations can be useful because they illuminate in that moment a reason for that person to feel a bit more activist about what's going on in their home country and not just about what's going on in the States but it's an indication that we have some way to go in spreading the word about this practice. One of the optimistic things is that in recent years unannounced inspections and investigative journalism has started to lift the lid on these detention centres and we have seen that the most basic standards of dignity and safety and respect are very often denied these detainees there have been many instances of unlawful and sometimes fatal restraint denial of essential medical treatment and of course allegations of pretty horrendous physical and sexual abuse and the sexual abuse particularly at Yarlswood where the women are currently on hunger strike. The UNHCR has criticised the detention estate the HM Inspector of Prisons has criticised the detention estate the chief inspector of borders and immigration has criticised the detention estate and you may remember that the government a couple of years ago now commissioned Stephen Shaw to do a review of vulnerable people in detention and he's doing a second one it'll come out probably in June or July of this year and the government's own reviewer found that detention was a dehumanising process which undermines welfare and contributes to vulnerability. Last year in September a panorama documentary revealed the true scale of mistreatment and hopelessness at Brooke House and if anyone does this work you probably will have done a lot of work about Brooke House because it is very often where people go when they are at their most ill and when they have been detained for the most long it's the place where E-wing exists and E-wing is a solitary confinement wing but it's used so if you are you know acting out then you go on to E-wing as a punishment if you are floridly mentally unwell and you need reassurance and safety you go on to E-wing to the same cell but you have a little pot plant in the corner of the room um in the wake of the panorama documentary six G4S staff members were sacked immediately um and the home affairs parliament's home affairs select committee began an inquiry into the scandal I think if you had one of those undercover programs really at any detention centre you would uncover similar levels of abuse in 2017 alone reports suggest that 10 people died in immigration detention most of them were taking their own lives I say reports suggest because I was involved in a case in fact the last case I did before I moved to liberty where basically the home office tried to cover up a death in detention they lifted their detention powers about half an hour before a person died while shackled and having open heart surgery um on the basis of that they said there was no need for an independent investigation into this man's death they'd done their own internal investigation but they were saying they were refusing to release it on the basis that it would be too upsetting for the family to read so 10 people that we know of died in immigration detention last year and again as many of you will know since 2010 there have been six cases where the courts have found a violation of article three of the european convention and people aren't lawyers in the room article three is pretty much the biggest one perhaps only after article two about not taking life it's the right not to be tortured and treated in a way that is inhuman and degrading um it's you can't violate that right um those are the reported cases and you can go away and read them and they're shocking but anyone who has worked in this area will have settled many cases where the facts are worse than those ones because those are the cases that the government thought they could win that's why they fight them and i don't know how many article three cases have been settled i did many there was a time when i was probably settling one or two a month where the article three breaches were so clear and so egregious that the government had no option other than to write a pretty substantial check which of course always came with a pretty strict confidentiality agreement but what it does mean is that we can safely assume that the very worst cases of the very worst abuse are things that will never see the light of day because the home office will never let them inside a courtroom and what i really believe and it comes back to what i was saying about you know having done these other areas of work and this just not happening on the same level i really believe that there is no other context where we would tolerate repeated public findings of violations of article three it doesn't happen in police cells now and again you will get a shocking case i don't want to belittle some of those cases now and again you will now and again in psychiatric care now and again in prison but there is no equivalent of a fairly regular annual finding of these article three breaches and i do think we have to ask the question of why it is as a society in that context the context that concerns only migrants we are in some way content for those abuses to continue i think that it must be connected to a climate of xenophobia that is connected to the hostile environment and is connected to the rhetoric and is connected to the way that politics about immigration has unfolded as i say you can read those cases and you know they will depress you and inspire you to work on these issues but there's also something about the way that the government defends these cases which i think speaks to an attitude which again you don't see and you know i'm a claimant lawyer i saw some pretty crappy arguments from the government in lots of different contexts but there's a case called HA which is one of the article three cases not my case but they this man HA was Nigerian he was very very very sick indeed and he was kind of in the revolving door between psychiatric care and detention in and out in and out and you know again you read the facts of the case he used to lie with his eyes rolled back in his head because he was so unwell in a kind of floridly psychotic state naked he'd pull his mattress onto the floor of his room and just lie there he wouldn't eat wouldn't drink except for now and again when he would drink from the toilet in his room and this was being given as an example by his lawyers in the hearing in front of mr justice sing of how sick he was and how the failure transfer him out of detention and to hospital had been a breach of his article three rights which was eventually the finding and julie anderson who's a senior yeah well she's a senior barrister right senior barrister for the for senior barrister who acts for the home office instructed on all of these cases and you know we laugh because sometimes she she's not the most effective lawyer but in that case and I you know I really name her in shame though because she deserves it for this in that case she made a submission that the reason that ha was drinking from the toilet bowl was because in Nigeria people love the idea of such fresh water that in Nigeria people urinate and defecate in the water of the river where they also drink and wash their clothes and wash their food and get their cooking water and so when you come to the UK and you're Nigerian of course you're going to get down on your knees and drink from the toilet and you know that submission very wisely batmerfee got the transcript of that hearing it didn't make it into the judgment but they got the transcript of that hearing so that we would remember that that submission was made in the home office's name at the rcj not very far from here it's a racist submission it's one that the government should be ashamed to have ever had made in its name but again it's something that you know rebindasing didn't like it they lost the case but that's there's no national outcry that that's what the government is saying in these cases the futility of the whole system is also chillingly clear so again as you may know many people in detention are not returned to their home country the the the beginning of detention as an idea was it's going to be a short term holding facility we still have those but it's going to be a short term holding facility so that you can get someone on a plane put him in one place near Gatwick get him on a plane get them home and lots of people would agree with that as an idea i'm not saying that i agree with it but i think lots of people would and of course it's then ballooned into this whole estate and last year more people were released from detention back into the community than were deported that fact alone tells you this is a system that is simply not working as at december 2017 the longest period of time a person had served in detention and of course this is not counting the people before who had served many years in detention was 1698 days that's over four and a half years and there are people who serve shorter sentences for rape last year 2000 people detained for more than four months 200 for over a year and 28 people for more than two years in november last year and this is kind of building to the point that i want to make which is that there is a bit of a groundswell here you know we may not be reading about this on the front pages of the papers every day but actually the tide i really think is turning so in november last year you may have seen that the bar council you know not necessarily a kind of radical body but the bar council produced a report making it absolutely clear that people are held in immigration to detention for too long that they do not have adequate access to justice and that they need more legal help amnesty research published in january confirmed that decisions to detain are very often based on mistakes and on flawed reasoning and that the assumption is to detain rather than of course the presumption being to release and i mentioned the bar council i mentioned amnesty because i think for a long time and this critique can be levelled at liberty as well for a long time this issue was seen as the prevail of the migrants rights sector and it wasn't seen as a mainstream human rights issue and i do think when you have the bar council weighing in we've seen in the last few months the bma the British Medical Association weighing in amnesty is weighing in liberty i'm glad to say is weighing in i do think that we are starting to see people recognizing that this is a human rights issue it's not a migrants rights issue it's a human rights issue the other thing that i think it's important to be really clear about is that immigration detention in this country is indefinite and i say that because again in this room you probably say that all the time and the reason it's indefinite is because there's no time limit so the campaign is and has always been for a time limit on immigration detention of 28 days and we are the only country in europe that doesn't put a time limit on its detention of migrants and you know as michael really powerfully said people in prison count down and people in immigration detention count up the government in the last two months or so has started to deny that we have indefinite immigration detention in this country so much so that you know you start questioning your own sanity and so i went back to basics and looked up the word indefinite in the oxford english dictionary and found that as i had suspected synonyms for the word indefinite include unknown indeterminate unspecified unlimited unrestricted undefined unfixed all words that of course perfectly accurately describe the length of detention in the uk but like i say over the past few months no doubt and hopefully because they are getting wind of the fact that there is a growing movement for change in this area the government has started to deny indefinite detention and so amber rudd for example wrote to andrew mitchell after he had asked if he could go and visit brooke house and said in it i note you have included your article he wrote an article for conservative home i note that you've included your article on detention policy in your correspondence specifically highlighting the fact we have no time limit on detention which i read with interest as you will be aware it is not possible to detain a person indefinitly in the uk detention must last no longer than is necessary days later on question time just last week brandon louis who is an immigration minister said the same thing we don't have indefinite detention in this country amber rudd said the same thing on tuesday in the house of commons and then on wednesday we had lady williams who was leading for the tories in a debate that brian paddock had started in the lords this week on immigration detention he was raising among other things the issue of the hunger strike in y Ellswood and lady williams replied to paddock when he said we have indefinite immigration detention uh saying it is quite fair to say most people in detention 92 percent that that's not actually correct um do not stay in detention for more than four months so the notion that someone might be detained indefinitely is simply not there and then she went on to say the reason for detention is for the purposes of removal it is not to detain indefinitely so in quite an extraordinary way we are seeing this sort of double speak double think um about indefinite detention we've never seen it before it's a it's a sort of new bit of rhetoric that they've come up with and obviously feel quite like it's quite clever um but you know it's it's good in the sense that if it's a sign that they're on the run then that's good it's bad in the sense that this is unacceptable you know these are people whose humanity has completely deserted them if they are resort resorting to this kind of politics lady williams in that debate went on to say about the women in y Ellswood that um there were many reasons why you might refuse to eat and those would include dietary and religious reasons and again you know you read that in Hansard and you just think this is an unforgivable way to speak about people and about their dignity and about their liberty of course again as you will know there are plenty of alternatives to immigration detention detention action have done amazing work looking at alternative models in sweden where of course because it does seem to be some sort of utopia um they have managed to create systems for case management in the community which lead to higher rates of voluntary return perhaps unsurprisingly because people feel like they can trust the system and have faith in the system and participate in the system unlike here where it is based on coercion and control and aggressive enforcement which alienates people and forces them underground but as i say while you would be forgiven for thinking that this is all pretty bleak and pretty enormous and pessimistic i really do stand here optimistic about this issue i think momentum is gathering and i think people are starting to wrap their heads around the fact that this is a human rights issue that if you care about any human rights issue you have to care about this one one of the things that really struck me and i talked about this in my job interview for the for the liberty job was and again i think you know i do think it speaks to this context of how we think about immigrants one of liberty's great campaign successes um was the stopping of the labor government proposal to detain terror suspects without charge for 90 days and they worked with david davis with andrew mitchell with a sort of civil libertarian part of the conservative party who were then in opposition and they successfully managed to stop this no question pernicious proposal and i reflected later that it was interesting to me that no one then thought to join the dots and say well why if it's not okay for terror suspects why why do we i mean you know there's a time sometimes where you give your right arm for 90 days in immigration detention and why aren't we connecting these two things and why aren't we just deploying the same arguments that we used over there that we managed to persuade people who are not often on our side managed to persuade them of terror suspects you know a tough crowd why did we not just read across and run those same arguments and of course at that time one of the big arguments that some people in politics and some people in the police and the security services were running was 90 days is needed because 28 days 14 days is not long enough to do our job we have to be able to investigate and we need that time to be able to investigate properly and put together everything that we need to be able to charge someone and if we release these people onto the streets god knows what they'll go on to do but we know that it will be terrible and fundamentally that argument just got debunked and the response was it's too great an infringement of civil liberties do your job better and do it faster and sure enough since then what we actually don't see you know we do see some of these policies rearing their heads and you know as annan said there's a voracious appetite for counter-terror law in this country but actually we don't often credibly see people saying we would be preventing these terror attacks if only we had 90 day detention because we have understood that actually in 14 days and extendable to 28 if they need it the police can do their job in that time the home office of course when confronted with the suggestion that there might be a 28 day time limit on detention say well we can't possibly get our act together to deport someone in 28 days and if we had to release them I mean these are nasty people who knows what could happen in our communities it's not good enough it's the same argument that was run before it didn't work then and it shouldn't work again now and my real hope is that just like with 90 days we will eventually get to a place where we will remember when those arguments were run we will remember how tired and un persuasive they were and we'll be glad that we've seen the back of them and I think generally speaking from where I'm standing we have seen some real hopeful green shoots of activism particularly since the referendum we have seen so many people signing petitions joining protests joining liberty joining amnesty supporting cases setting up local groups forming coalitions finding a way and whatever is meet ways meaningful to them to make their voices heard and you know the amendment in the last immigration bill that sought to put a time limit on immigration detention it didn't lose by that many votes and of course now the parliamentary arithmetic is much more finely balanced and we know that there are conservative rebels on this issue Andrew Mitchell I've mentioned Caroline Spellman is another and of course they would be joining the very clear positions taken by both Labour and the Liberal Democrats and the Greens and others at previous elections that they want to put a 28 day time limit on immigration detention perhaps surprisingly as well and again another sign but actually you know this is an issue that can really bring people with it there is an early day motion at the moment um in parliament and that early day motion calls for a time limit on immigration detention and it was laid by two members of the dup and you wouldn't necessarily think the dup would be allies on this but they of course come from a country where they really understand the damage that administrative internment can do. So I feel really proud to say that Liberty this is our flagship campaign this year ending indefinite detention it's a long time coming and I think it's only right that we step up to add our voice to this campaign and of course we do it in the context of genuinely incredible work that has been done by many others over many years. We will have an opportunity later this year we will have an immigration bill that will set out our post brexit immigration system and that is an opportunity to lay an amendment for a time limit and we have people on all sides of the political spectrum saying that they would be willing to put their name to that amendment. What is crucial is the pressure in my job one of the things that I learned which is maybe obvious but I hadn't really thought about before is that MPs you know they really care about whether they're going to get any votes that I did figure out but MPs will frequently say to you if we get five letters on an issue not such a big deal we get 50 letters on an issue we listen MPs in marginal seats probably listen to a fewer number of letters so what's really crucial and where you come in and everyone you know comes in is turning up the heat outside Westminster because they do feel it and so we've started with a very simple ask which is a petition to gather signatures to demand that Amber Rudd puts a time limit in the bill there will be many other actions that follow it will ratchet up as the bill comes and so sign that petition keep in touch with us keep in touch with the many organisations that are working on this issue but do it from a place of optimism because this genuinely is the year that this could change and you owe it to the people in detention and you owe it to the people who give their lives over to this kind of work to also add your voice and of course from time to time the stars do align and amazing things do happen the best example at the moment is the me too movement and in the last year from a position that I don't think anyone really predicted we have seen you know we haven't solved it but we have seen the patriarchy just start to wobble a little bit on its pedestal and we see great campaigns in history that suddenly come together you know Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat on a bus and Martin Luther King had given his I have a dream speech twice before he gave it in Washington but for whatever reason the stars aligned and the wind blew in the right direction and something captured the public imagination much bigger than any law could ever do or any bill in parliament and something changed and it could not be undone and what I wish for is that that's what happens with migrants rights in this country and everywhere over the next few years and I think of course it will be a fight that as David Foster Wallace said demands attention and awareness and discipline and effort and being able to truly care about other people but I think in that fight there is real hope and there is real freedom for people that are in those detention centres and actually there's real freedom for all of us so please do go forth tonight with a little bit of optimism about this very important issue that of course was so close to Kay's heart and think that this might be the year that we finally see an end to this terrible abuse thank you. A wonderful, inaugural lecture very moving indeed and thank you very much. If anybody has any comments or questions, observations, Martha is very happy to engage, to talk about the liberty campaign or any of the issues that she's touched on. We do have a roving mic or two being held by student ambassadors in soas t-shirts Matthew. Thank you, that was a very moving speech, thank you for that. I'm just wondering in recent legislation they introduced something that people who don't apply for bail will automatically be given a bail hearing. I think it's after four months and then I heard that when you're taken into detention you're asked to tick a box to say you opt out of getting your automatic bail hearing so I just want to know what your view of that was and whether liberty would be seeking to challenge that. We've also heard about this and so our initial investigations are that it's not it doesn't happen but others are saying that it is happening and automatic bail hearings I think are really important although I think unless you're also entitled to representation they're very often meaningless for the people who need those hearings the most. There was a case recently the VC case which is about the fact that there is no system whatsoever for people who lack capacity and detention you don't get any help there's no way of having the supported decision-making mechanism or anything so for those people a bail hearing is utterly meaningless. So yes I think those kinds of automatic hearings I think automatic judicial oversight is a really important part of the strategy. We've kind of zeroed in on the time limit issue because ultimately I think our fear is that judicial oversight is important but you know we've all done bail hearings like the bail hearing I did and so it's not the perfect answer in the same way that you know another angle that some groups have kind of run within the past is about detention of vulnerable groups and an attempt to sort of say well let's commit to not detaining children or pregnant women or victims of trafficking and torture and again our view is that you know those are the easy cases that get picked off and actually you have to do the kind of tanks on the lawn time limit for everybody and if you don't have that you're never going to have a justice system. Oh you're here. Hi Martha. I'm Alison Pickup. You mentioned bid when you mentioned me and you mentioned bid a few times. I don't know if anyone's here from bid but I'm just going to do a plug on their behalf if that's okay. They are currently crowdfunding for a case against the government for failing to designate G4S as a high risk strategic supplier in the wake particularly of that panorama documentary about Brookhouse and so they've raised £9,855 out of their needed £11,000 so this is just a plug please support their campaign it's the most brilliant idea to hold the government to account for failing to hold G4S to account so if you google what do we google bid G4S crowd justice you'll find the site. Right do it. Hi I'm Nina I work at Wilson solicitors and I was supervised by Kay. Thank you for your talk I feel really optimistic after listening to it and it's really nice to feel optimistic about the work that we do. I just worry about the risk of compromise in the campaign. I'm thinking of the risk that for example foreign national offenders might be excluded from a time limit or that 28 days risks becoming the norm so that everybody's detained for 28 days no matter what or that maybe we end up with a time limit that's longer than 28 days for example six months which I understand is quite normal in other areas of Europe and I was wondering what liberty is going to do strategically to avoid those compromises so I think all of those compromises or unintended consequences are really realistic risks and there are more so I think the other risk that we think about is that you'll see a lot more deportations that they'll really push things like deport first and appeal later ultimately with all these campaigns across all areas compromise looms from the very beginning and unintended consequences are unavoidable so our position is that we won't compromise we would never say okay thanks very much we'll take six months and do a sort of deal or whatever although of course that's easy because we don't have to you know we it's not it's not difficult we're not the politicians and it's not to say that some of the people who currently are our allies in parliament wouldn't make those compromises and let us down for whatever reason so you know we're doing all the things you'd expect strategically we're doing very careful message testing we've got a whole bank of really persuasive stories we are being really clear when we talk to people like Andrew Mitchell that this is a kind of all-or-nothing situation he's very persuaded by the fact 28 days is the same as the terrorist suspect limit so I think there's there's kind of good narratives around all these things we've worked out messages that play well with different audiences you know we've got a pretty united cross-faith group speaking on this so there's lots of things that you can do to shore up the arguments I think ultimately you then just take the plunge because I do think often change is incremental and while I would never advocate for 28 days becoming the norm or more deportations I think you have to start from the point of principle of saying we have to end indefinite detention time and again we're told by people who've been in detention that it's it's indefinite nature that is the most destructive and so we try and deal with that problem and then there will be the unintended consequences and then we try and deal with those and otherwise I think the problem is you get paralysis because you can't move any which way without fear of something happening and they will come back with something of course they will but that's the next fight. Thank you very much for your excellent talk you mentioned that indefinite immigration detention is or you argued that it is policy driven and obviously no one can deny that but I wonder to what extent you also think it's it's driven by economic interest because we we've heard about the role of G4S there's a number of private providers they are profiting from the system so my question is a what role do they play in sustaining the system as it is what role do you expect them to play I mean the answer seems to be pretty obvious in in your campaign and what is what is your advocacy on on dealing with that aspect of the indefinite immigration detention system? Yeah I mean I think you know it's a very good question and I think there's no doubt that although the genesis was policy and law and politics of course when you then create a system you know it's the old too big to fail adage and there is now a whole system and there's a lot of jobs that rely on it and a lot of profit although I think probably less profit than they originally aspired to in the same way that you see with the privatised part of the prison estate so you are then dealing with the corporate structure and so one aspect of the strategy is to look at the kind of corruption angles that are often quite effective and quite disruptive for those corporate power structures ultimately liberty's advocacy tends to be directed at government and at state bodies so as part of this campaign we do have a strand which is kind of about corporate power and corrupt corporate power but what we're actually trying to do because I don't think we are the most well placed to be the ones doing that advocacy because we don't we don't really interface with corporations very much is we're talking to other NGOs who work much more on corporate power particularly in the environmental sector to try and get them to push that angle in a way that we otherwise couldn't and those organisations you know people like global witness they have teams of investigators that are used to trying to deal with these big beasts like g4s and so the hope is that as the campaign gets going and you know very often with these campaigns wins get wins and so as more people want to become involved we hope that that corporate angle will take off a little bit more and and yeah the answer to your second question about what role do they play in the debate behind the scenes yeah I mean of course they're lobbying for their continued existence I would have thought there's a there's a hand up just behind you thank you my name's Miranda I work for Hackney Community Law Centre in Haringey Law Centre I just wanted to get your thoughts on Yarlswood I saw that your predecessor Shammy finally got him with Diane Abbott last week and on a personal level my mum is a storyteller and a poet and a singer and she's been asked to come in and do poetry and song and writing with women in Yarlswood and I'm just wondering what's going on after they wouldn't let anybody in and now they're letting in politicians and poets and storytellers is it campaigning is this a permanent change from what you know is going on why are they suddenly opening up yeah so we've also noticed the change so Andrew Mitchell in December wrote saying that he wanted to do a visit to Brookhouse didn't hear didn't hear and then got this letter that I quoted from from Amber Rudd authorising him to go and bear in mind no home secretary has ever been to a detention centre I mean again an indication the idea you'd have a justice minister who would never been to a prison is unthinkable so no sign that Amber Rudd is going to go to the Yarlswood or anywhere but I think you know my hopeful take on it and I don't have intelligence to suggest that it's right or wrong is that there is a sense that you cannot keep denying access in the way because if you can access prisons which you can what is the justification for not being able to access removal centres and I think when you have high profile people like Diane Aber or Shammy or Andrew Mitchell saying we want to go do you really want to be putting in black and white that you're going to deny them a visit I just don't think you can I don't think it's politically feasible thanks so much for your talk it was very memorable and very enlightening my name is Josh I'm a journalist by trade I'm just quite interested in terms of raising awareness obviously I think you highlighted that not a lot of people are aware of indefinite detention but my question really is how can we make people care more about it because the reality is that there are a lot of big issues like tax avoidance on the Panama Papers and that exposed a lot of injustices but people kind of shoved their shoulders and said so what so when it comes to things like indefinite detention what can we do to make people care more if we can't appeal to people's basic humanity and what message can we really hit home to make people care about this issue which is a very important one yeah I mean it's a good question I think it's quite easy to feel as you say as the you know Panama Papers and Paradise Papers role and or you know go back further and nobody seems to really mind about what Edward Snowden reveals you know there's lots of kind of big moments where you can hang your head and think we live in a bit of an apathetic nation I think the really the real potential with immigration detention as an issue at least to start with is that there are whole parts of the base that don't know about it and when they find out about it they feel very passionately about it and I'm not sure that you do need to persuade the whole population that it's bad and I don't think you would even if you tried you certainly wouldn't if you're just the NGO sector or just the Guardian or just the BBC but actually what we find time and again is that people who are inclined to support issues like that just haven't heard it and so in fact getting coverage in places like you know for many of Liberty's issues we don't really it's you know the Guardian are amazing but we don't like chalk that up as a win when they cover something that we work on because we know that their readership are supportive of it and we're not we're not winning any hearts and minds actually on immigration detention the research suggests that when you when the usual suspects cover it people do change their mind because they just didn't know about it in the first place so that I think is a kind of that's where the hopefulness comes in with with raising awareness on this issue and I think it's a good place to start because trying to convert everyone is impossible so start with the activist base that you might be able to make do something in the next 12 months and then hope that it spreads from there and then there you know so some of the messaging work that we've done has been around how to engage young people and there's lots interestingly there's lots about you know how to make an emotional connection and much of that has focused on this idea of waiting so if anyone's seen the Liberty campaign graphics and stuff all of that is around this idea of departure boards an indefinite delay and it's because lots of the research was that young people have a really visceral understanding of how painful it is to wait for anything like even when a YouTube video yeah so they they hate it when YouTube buffers and they hate it when a train is delayed by like two minutes and if you can tap that sense of I can't even bear to wait for the YouTube video to load and then in that moment say imagine if it was your liberty you know whatever um then that so far has played quite it's not on my brain works but we worked with some creative people um and we got some funding to do some focus group work and some message testing and that was some very interesting feedback which we are now trusting and experimenting with and so I think again you know the sector can learn to be a bit braver about how it approaches some of these issues there are still some there's some there's lots of hands going up so um there's a there's a gentleman okay sorry the question I wanted to ask was the new rules with regard to bail uh they're making it as the obvious route once somebody's got bail they no longer come under the judiciary they are handed over to the home office well I have assiduously asked each and every time quite recently um for that not to happen and I am asked why and on the whole I've got my way what do you think about it am I being needlessly um suspicious I mean I'm always suspicious so just just being suspicious is a good thing in my book but um just so I understand do you mean that there should be judicial supervision then of the person that has been yes once you've got bail they get you get transferred to the home office unless you object and the judge agrees that it stays with the with the judiciary yeah yeah so like I say no I don't think you're being suspicious um and yes I think the more judicial scrutiny I mean fundamentally what I think is that the more independent scrutiny of home office decision making and home office operations the better and so whether that is a judge or some other mechanism you know fine um but yes I think there's every reason to seek that scrutiny and not least because you know I talked about the hostile environment policies I talked about the way that people are then going to be treated you know we know the story with bail accommodation it's not as though the moment that you are released from detention on bail life becomes rosy um and you are as vulnerable to abuse and to being redetained when you are in those moments after after leaving detention as you probably are just before you leave detention so yes I think sounds like you're fighting a good and important fight on that one so you've got an impossible job it's so easy for us to see and it's just not hi my name's Simon Cox I used to be an immigration barrister in the UK and I work in some other countries now doing some similar work um thank you Martha that was a fantastic speech and it's great for those of us with an interest in migrants rights to see that liberty has taken up this issue um I just wanted to mention for the sister on the other side of the room who just spoke about the new bail rules I spent eight years on the tribunal procedures committee and certainly it's very worrying that the home office and some judges feel that the default position should be that power is transferred to the home office to supervise where bail is granted in particular because it means that the remedy is judicial review and not going back to a regular immigration judge and while judicial review judges may be better um they take legal aid and they take solicitors to get to them and I think that the home office is trying to put relatively accessible justice out of reach for people who are being handed their system and judges who don't want to be dealing with bail cases are may be going along with it so it's great here that you're opposing it and I had two thoughts really the first was um it's very expensive and it's 100 pounds a day to keep people in detention and you mentioned the um the article three cases they're very expensive a lot of money going to wilson's a lot of money going to bat murphy a lot of money going to garden caught and doughty street um and all of that money that's going into g4s and the legal aid community could have gone to northampton county council for elderly care could have gone for all other kinds of things that the government says it says matters but actually gives a a blank check to the home office um and I think the bigger piece here which I don't think is liberties fight though it would be great to have you in it it's all of our fight uh is that the detention system is only one part of a a broken immigration system broken for a very small number of people I mean the vast majority of us cross borders easily um but uh for a small number it's really broken and it's broken I think deliberately uh because officials don't want to make fair quick decisions because if they made fair quick decisions they'd be letting a lot more people stay uh and because to raise the main set targets with no means of meeting them and so instead of being able to apply the law they look around for reasons to refuse and one of their key tools is intimidating people out of the country by detaining them indefinitely so I think that um shrinking the detention estate um most drastically with a 28 day cut but the measure that seems to be the message to people at Andrew Mitchell is if you want a working immigration system for after brexit then get your job done within 28 days it's not that hard and that needs a massive culture change in the home office because the number of competent people in the home office um well it's certainly smaller than this lecture theatre um and it's a it's a department that's full of people who are incompetent or malign or both so when Julie Anderson gets up and she's racist she does that because that's what her clients like they didn't fire her for that yeah she she wasn't speaking for herself she's speaking for Theresa May and the immigration officer who's sitting right behind her um so I think that we also therefore need as a community to be clearing out the home office because we need staff who want to serve the community in an efficient way want to make realistic migration decisions and do it within a reasonable budget and at the moment we don't have those people running the country's immigration service on behalf of Theresa May I mean I can't imagine many people in the room disagree with you I think it's it's right that one of the reasons why I kind of whenever I'm talking about detention I try and talk about immigration enforcement generally is because I do think detention is only one part of the picture and we all need to be clued up enough and engaged enough to talk about those other parts of it um I think the economic argument is an important one you know we don't know the compensation figures the recent ones but in 2010 to 2014 compensation alone so not the hundred pounds a day was 15 million um so that's big numbers the problem is that economic arguments as a campaign strategy don't play um and so the reason that they're not front and centre of liberty's campaign and they're not front and centre of the detention forums campaigning is because you know we know from brexit people don't really hear it don't really care and are happy for the trade off to be it's expensive but we don't like immigrants so it's fine um so that's why I think you don't see those things front and centre um and you know I think it's they know that the home office is in trouble because when the home office has to start as well as doing what it's currently doing also managing EU migration you know that in government they know it's going to break and they are trying to design systems you know even the system they're trying to design about regularising the EU nationals that are here is this mad online system that is you know you can just it's full of data protection breaches already and they haven't even launched it it's it's gonna it's gonna fail um and so I think there is a little opening for that conversation with the politicians because they are aware that the home office is not fit for purpose post brexit and so that does give us some space to talk about what a fit for purpose home office might look like um but obviously you know as you say you're swimming against the ideology of the people at the top at the moment thank you thank you very much indeed for all those questions comments I'm now going to ask Carol to conclude proceedings I like having the last word so even though it's late in the in the day late in these proceedings welcome to so us particularly if this is your first visit to so us our welcome is as warm as the day is cold so I first heard of Kay Everett in November 2016 when I was contacted by Wilson's and when Michael Hanley visited so us shortly thereafter to discuss how we might be involved my colleague Dr Catherine Jenkins was sitting up there and I were both struck and really left with the impression of a deep loss to Wilson's of a respected colleague and a well-loved colleague hearing about Kay's work she and I felt that it was entirely appropriate that so us law school worked with Wilson's to remember Kay Kay's work and that of Wilson's is very so assy so many of our postgraduate students are enrolled on the same LLM that Kay was enrolled on or on the similar MA program on human rights students of these programs along with those enrolled on other programs are likely to take the module on international protection of human rights I have to say that because Lutz is here today and and that on refugee and migration law Clara and Lutz are here human rights of women Islamic law and human rights and other modules that look at particular moments of social and political change in which human rights loom large some of our students are also members of a clinic course on human rights through which they are engaged in research for partner NGOs so it's absolutely the right place um for this memorial lecture um I've spent the evening also thinking about a former student of mine called Claire who was an immigration lawyer up in Scotland but she gave up that work for to be an LLM student for a year and one day I saw her dragging along well not dragging along uh carrying what was obviously a large but empty suitcase and I asked her about it and she said well I'm lugging this around because this evening I'm going to a detention centre and the person I've been visiting there is probably going to be deported and she will need to suitcase so I think you will find that so as uh some students who are ready to sign petitions and write letters to their MPs nearly 80 of our LLB or BA law students are taking the foundations of human rights law class and nearly 30 of our students are studying asylum and immigration law a module that gives them some practical experience working with those who've become snalled up in the asylum and immigration system human rights and access to justice are in fact present in much of our teaching and not just in the specific modules that I've mentioned it is also present in the research agendas of many of my colleagues whether they are looking at transitional justice Islamic law Chinese law social change and law and society criminal justice it's used to do with land climate change or migrant workers it's therefore gratifying to see those early plans discussed with Michael come to fruition this evening and and I don't have much more to say uh you'll be pleased to hear because I I realise that I stand between you and refreshments so so I will draw this inaugural lecture and price giving to a close by first congratulating our prize winner Ada secondly by thanking Christine Jumper whom I think is hiding somewhere by the door who's hard work is behind the success of this evening and finally I would like to thank our inaugural K Everett memorial lecturer Martha Spurier and finally I would like to thank Michael for giving so us this wonderful opportunity to remember an alumna and to inspire our students at the same time I've asked Michelle Massey who's seated there QC one of our school one of the school of laws senior fellows to present a token of the school of laws appreciation to both Martha and Michael thank you very much lastly well thank you Michelle and lastly thank you very much to you all for supporting this event drinks our butterfly a flight of steps away up there