A week in Damascus

It’s not many jobs which start with a week in Damascus!  After seven years at the Bar I was thrilled to be invited to join Leigh Day & Co’s Complex Claims department to work on their international cases.  Prior to becoming a Barrister I had lived in Africa for two years and worked with local lawyers on public interest litigation.  I thought I had experienced a lot but the Middle East was something new.

The Iraqi conflict has produced shock waves throughout the region and inevitably it has created a huge refugee population.  Recent UNHCR figures state that out of a total population of 26 million, some 4.4 million Iraqis are uprooted, including 2.4 million displaced inside Iraq and 2 million outside – mainly in Syria and Jordan.  Leigh, Day & Co are focusing on two types of case, first Iraqi refugees who have been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by the British Army and, secondly, Iraqi interpreters who have been targeted for collaborating with “the occupiers”.

I worked under the patient supervision of Sapna Malik and Shubhaa Srinivasan.  Daily a steady stream of Iraqi refugees came to our hotel and told us of their experiences of torture, kidnap, assassination and ultimately escape from the horror their lives had become.   I spent the week interviewing former interpreters for the British Army and their stories all had similar tragic threads.  Many interpreters had started to work for the British Army in 2004 on a wave of optimism but gradually they started to receive threats.  By 2005 interpreters were disappearing on their way to work and from their beds at night and turned up dead in a dustbin the following morning, with signs of having been brutally tortured.  Many interpreters kept on working despite the increasing death toll amongst their colleagues for the simple reason that there were no other jobs available.  Then after each receiving particularly specific death threats the refugees we interviewed decided to flee.

But asylum in Syria has been no solution.  As a group they live in fear that the wider Iraqi refugee community may discover they worked for the British, which would place their lives and those of their families in danger.  Equally, Syria has not signed the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and does not allow Iraqis to work.  Most we spoke to were living on small and dwindling money transfers from their hard pressed families in Iraq, others were close to destitution.

The British Government has responded to the increasing public pressure by conceding that they have a duty of care to former British Army workers and announced the Locally Employed Staff Assistance Scheme on the 30th October 2007.  The Scheme allows for the resettlement of a maximum of 600 Iraqis and their families provided they meet extremely rigid service criteria.  However, as our interviews progressed, it became painfully obvious that many of the most needy cases were being excluded by the draconian criteria which the British Government has adopted.  Leigh Day & Co has been instructed to represent the Iraqi interpreters who were interviewed in Damascus.

This is a big change from Stratford Employment Tribunal and it’s a huge privilege to be working for a law firm which seeks to fight for those who face injustices overseas of all kinds and which is willing to invest time and money on difficult international cases as a matter of principle.
 
Dan Leader has joined Leigh Day & Co from 36 Bedford Row, the Chambers of Frances Oldham QC.  He has seven years experience as a Barrister, specialising in personal injury, employment law and human rights.  Prior to joining the Bar, Dan worked on human rights and public interest law in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya.  He was awarded the Bar Pro Bono Award for this work in 2001.  In 2005 he was a member of a working group which made detailed recommendations to the Government on the implementation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
 
Dan has a longstanding interest in international human rights litigation and will be working in the Complex Claims Department and specifically on international claims with Martyn Day and Sapna Malik.  Dan was in Damascus during the second week of April, with the Leigh Day & co team, and took evidence from Iraqi's who interpreted for the British Army and are now refugees in Syria.