The human rights lawyer battling Palestine Action's legal ban

Telegraph

11-07-2025

From IRA bombing suspects in the 1970s to alleged al-Qaeda terrorists at the turn of the millennium, veteran human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce has built her career on representing some of Britain's most reviled defendants over the past 50 years.
And now, aged 85, she is once again taking on the state. Peirce has agreed to represent Palestine Action in its fight against the Home Office ruling to proscribe it as a terrorist organisation, putting it on a par with al-Qaeda and Isis.
After a destructive five-year campaign targeting Israeli weapons factories in the UK, the Government was moved to ban the group this month after it forced entry into RAF Brize Norton, spray-painting two aircraft red, and causing £7 million worth of damage.
With membership – or even support – of Palestine Action now carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison, the group has employed the services of Peirce to fight what it believes is a draconian measure that conflates protest with terrorism.
'She specialises in representing pariahs of society,' once observed Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim who spent three years detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay and later sued the British government for its complicity. 'I know because I'm one of them.'
Indeed, if Peirce were a different kind of lawyer, she might now be in the House of Lords, reflecting on a glittering career and polishing her CBE. Instead, she politely refused the honour in 1999 – and has remained a relentless thorn in the side of successive governments ever since.
Her client list reads like a roll-call of recent history's most controversial figures – from hate preacher Abu Qatada and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to British Isis bride Shamima Begum. And her list of landmark victories against British officials is equally formidable.
'The fickleness of society means that one day a pariah can be a hero, and vice versa,' the usually media-shy lawyer told the BBC in a rare interview in 2014. Peirce has often claimed her motivations lie not in sympathy for her clients' cause necessarily but instead in the legal principle to ensure fair protection for all, no matter the state of public feeling or political will.
Her critics, however, haven't always quite seen it that way. Some say she conflates advocacy with activism. In 2005, Michael Gove – then a Tory candidate for MP – branded Peirce a 'passionate, committed and effective supporter of the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance', an organisation intent on 'destabilising the props of the establishment'.
Indeed, her rare forays into public protestation have not always appeared to follow the principle of law first, feeling second – and never more so than when it comes to the subject of Israel. As far back as 2009, Peirce was speaking out against the 'occupation' of Gaza, which she said was being 'bombed almost out of existence'.
In more recent times, she has signed open letters condemning the 'genocide' of Palestinians and has also taken up the brief for Mo Chara – one third of the notorious Irish rap group Kneecap – over terrorism charges for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag at a London gig last year. Therefore, while Peirce has not commented on her work with Palestine Action, it would appear to follow a theme.
For a figure who has been at the heart of so many of Britain's fiercest legal controversies, Peirce has a surprisingly timid persona, with a quiet voice and hiding behind a fringe that hangs half over her eyes.
Some might recognise her from the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, where she was played by Emma Thompson. It told the story of Peirce's crucial role in exonerating the Guildford Four, who had spent 14 years in prison after being wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombing in the Surrey town.
Representing Irish defendants at the height of the Troubles was certainly no easy task. The case cemented her reputation as not only a star lawyer with painstaking attention to detail, but as someone drawn to defend those whom others would denounce. A surprising calling, perhaps, given her genteel upbringing in the Cotswolds and later the Yorkshire Dales.
Born Jean Margaret Webb in 1940 to parents who ran a grammar school, she enjoyed a privileged education at Cheltenham Ladies' College and Oxford. But it was her subsequent work as a journalist in 1960s America, following Martin Luther King Jr's civil rights campaign and witnessing the systematic injustice for African Americans first hand, that forged her world view.
Returning to London in 1970, with an American husband and young son in tow and having changed her name to Gareth (she has never revealed why), Peirce took up law at the London School of Economics. She then took up a training post with radical London law firm Benedict Birnberg – one of the few practices then championing civil liberties – and qualified in 1978.
The following decade saw Peirce establish her name. 'My job is to get you out and I'm going to get you out,' she told Gerry Conlon, the leading member of the Guildford Four, when they first met, in Long Lartin prison in 1987. 'Within 20 minutes, I felt, 'This is the person who's going to get me out of prison,'' he would later recall. 'She was so convincing in her belief that the system had the ability to own up to huge errors and mistakes.'
Her meticulous investigation uncovered suppressed evidence, including a police statement that provided Conlon with an alibi. In 1989, the Guildford Four walked free. They were soon followed in 1991 by the Birmingham Six, again as a result of Peirce exposing unreliable evidence over their conviction for a pub bombing 16 years prior.
The great theme of Peirce's one and only book – Dispatches from the Dark Side, published in 2010 – is that justice dies when the law is co-opted for political purposes. And if the Irish were in the crosshairs of the state during the 1970s and 1980s, Muslims soon took their place after 9/11.
Peirce began representing those facing injustices within the Islamic community, advocating for British nationals held at Guantanamo Bay and fighting the detention of the so-called Belmarsh detainees, who were being held indefinitely in the high-security prison under Tony Blair's anti-terrorism legislation. The latter were mostly Muslim refugees who were 'suspected international terrorists' with links to al-Qaeda, according to the home secretary at the time, David Blunkett, including Abu Qatada. The evidence, however, was based on intelligence that the suspects were not allowed to see or challenge, which Peirce argued created a shadow justice system that abandoned basic legal protections. When the House of Lords finally ruled their detention illegal in 2005, Peirce had scored another landmark victory.
'We have lost our way in this country,' Peirce had warned a year earlier, commenting on what she saw as 'unchecked fascistic' language directed at Muslims. 'We have entered a new dark age of injustice and it is frightening that we are overwhelmed by it.' In 2009, as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan raged, she warned that the US and UK had not launched a war on terror but a war on human rights.
Her strength of feeling on the issue continued long after. In 2016, Peirce accused the British government of waging a 'covert war' on political dissent amid proposals to outlaw non-violent extremism. 'The UK is further than any other in terms of thought control legislation,' she told an anti-Prevent event at Goldsmiths University.
Unsurprisingly, Peirce's work has not gone unnoticed among the Muslim community.
The esteem in which Peirce's Arabic-speaking clients held her saw them nickname her 'al-Umm', meaning both 'mother' and 'the greatest', according to Begg.
Such has been the extent of her success, even some of Peirce's opponents revere her. 'All her geese were swans, of course, but she always represented her clients to the very best of her ability,' described legendary prosecutor Sir John Nutting KC about his 'old sparring partner' to the BBC in 2014. 'She has great integrity, although was always terribly earnest and serious. The prosecuting team in one case had a bet once as to who could be the first to make her crack a smile during the trial. I won, but it took me several days.'
While some of her peers may have cashed in on their courtroom fame, Peirce has always trodden a quieter path.
She lives fairly modestly in a Victorian terraced house – albeit on a street of million-pound houses – in north-west London, with much of her work financed either by Legal Aid or given pro bono.
Her latest case, the legal action brought by Palestine Action, is set to be funded by £300,000 donated by more than 8,000 supporters. Earlier this month, a last-minute legal challenge by the group to suspend the proscription under anti-terrorism laws failed and, on July 5, it officially became a criminal offence to become a member of, or show support for, the organisation. Another hearing is now scheduled for July 21, when Palestine Action will apply for permission for a judicial review to quash the order.
The group's own aims to end 'global participation in Israel's genocidal and apartheid regime' do not appear to stray far from Peirce's personal views. In May, she signed an open letter alongside more than 1,000 other lawyers, legal academics and former judges calling for the UK to act within its 'legal obligations' to stop the genocide of Gaza, including sanctions. Such action has not been taken.
The irony is probably not lost on Peirce that she is facing down a Government run by a prime minister who began his own career as a human rights lawyer. Before moving to Downing Street, the pair lived only a short 15-minute walk from each other in the wealthy suburb of Kentish Town – though that's as far as the connection seems to go, with neither appearing to have worked together or faced each other in court.
As she now prepares to go to battle with the state once again, Peirce will perhaps be readying herself as much for the scrutiny that comes with her clients as for the judicial challenge ahead.
Indeed, it was once put to Peirce in a 2014 BBC interview that some might feel her defence of those deemed enemies of the state must mean she was 'in cahoots' with them.
'That's a reflection of the shallowness of understanding of what the law is intended to do and the guarantees it's intended to provide for anyone,' she answered. 'Particularly the outlaws and outcasts of society… the people that the majority in society wish to have no protection.'