Borderline justice

This article reflects on the author's legal career of over thirty years as a barrister representing migrants and asylum seekers in the UK. It exposes the consistently inhumane treatment meted out by successive governments to migrants and asylum seekers. It examines the ways in which such treatment is embodied in an ever-more punitive regulatory system, often implemented by powerful and profitable corporations, at the state's behest. The hallmarks of a free society (universal rights not to be detained arbitrarily; access to justice; to fair trial; freedom from double punishment; freedom of movement) and those of a humane one (access to subsistence, shelter and health care) have all been called into question. In the service of relentless 'common-sense' racism, the law has been deployed against migrants and asylum seekers. However, through the sustained efforts of migrants and their solidarity groups, human rights lawyers and impartial judges, it has also been used to resist executive abuses of power, exclusion and injustice.