Gareth Peirce

Gareth Peirce (born 1940) is a British solicitor and human rights activist, She is best known for her work and advocacy in high-profile cases involving allegations of human rights injustices.

Her work in the case involving Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four was chronicled in the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, in which she was portrayed by Emma Thompson, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Peirce.^[1][2]

Personal life

She was born Jean Margaret Webb in Cheltenham, the daughter of Margaret (née Twidell) and John Le Plastrier Webb.^[3] She has a younger brother, BAFTA Award-winning filmmaker Peter Webb.^[4] She changed her name from Jean to "Gareth" during her formative years. She was educated at the Cheltenham Ladies' College, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics .^[5][1][6][7]

She has been described as a very private person who shuns the limelight and refuses media interviews.^[5][7][8] She lives in Kentish Town, North London, with her husband, Mellen Chamberlain "Bill" Peirce,^[9] a writer and photographer, son of the American painter Waldo Peirce.^[6][10] Bill and Gareth Peirce have two sons, Nicholas and Zachary.^[11]

Career

In the 1960s, she worked as a journalist in the United States, following the campaign of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.^[12] Married, she returned to Britain in 1970 with her husband and elder son and undertook her postgraduate law degree at the London School of Economics.^[6]

In 1974, she joined the firm of the radical solicitor Benedict Birnberg^[13] as a trainee,^[5] being admitted to the Roll of Solicitors on 15 December 1978.^[14]

Following Birnberg's retirement in 1999,^[15] she continued to work as a senior partner of Birnberg Peirce and Partners.^[6] In the mid-1970s, she supported specific campaigns for legal reforms of police procedures that permitted the prosecution and conviction of persons based solely on identification evidence. Individual cases then very much in the news led to the establishment of Justice Against the Identification Laws (JAIL), an organisation which Gareth Peirce supports.^[16]

During her career she represented Judith Ward, a woman wrongfully convicted in 1974 of several IRA-related bombings, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes and Moazzam Begg, a man held in extrajudicial detention by the American government.^[5] In 2008, journalist Nadarajah Sethurupan, the founder of Norway News, appointed Peirce as his solicitor. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, appointed Peirce as his solicitor in Swedish Judicial Authority v Julian Assange.^[17]

Of her defence of Muslim suspects accused of terrorism, Peirce has said:

We have lost our way in this country. We have entered a new dark age of injustice and it is frightening that we are overwhelmed by it. I know I am representing innocent people; innocent people who know that a jury they face will inevitably be predisposed to find them guilty.^[18]

Recognition and reception

Her role in the defense of the Guildford Four was dramatized in the 1993 film, In the Name of the Father, with Peirce portrayed by Emma Thompson.^[5] Peirce has reportedly never watched the film, and stated in 1995 that she was "an extremely unimportant participant in the story" but was "given a seemingly important status". She was appointed CBE in 1999 for services to justice, but later wrote to Downing Street asking for it to be withdrawn, accepting responsibility and tendering an apology for any misunderstanding.^[7]

Sir Ludovic Kennedy, a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, dedicated a book to Peirce, calling her "the doyenne of British defence lawyers" and that she "refuses to be defeated in any case no matter how unfavourable it looks".^[7] Benedict Birnberg, who first employed her as a solicitor, believes she has "transformed the criminal justice scene in this country almost single-handedly".^[8]

Michael Gove, a journalist and later a Conservative MP, once described her as being a "passionate, committed and effective supporter of the Trotskyist Socialist Alliance", which he said was committed to destabilising the Establishment.^[13] In 2005, Gove told The Sunday Telegraph that as well as serving her clients, she has an "idealism that is motivated by a political agenda".^[7]

Peirce was one of the initial eight individuals inducted in March 2007 into Justice Denied magazine's Hall of Honor for her lifetime achievement in aiding the wrongly convicted.^[19]

Publications

Books by Peirce

• Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice. London: Verso. A collection of her essays for the London Review of Books.
  • Hardback, 2010; ISBN 978-1844676194.
  • Paperback, 2012; ISBN 978-1844677597.

Books with contributions by Peirce

• Tskhinvali: shock and awe. Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 2009; ISBN 9780851247571 (edited by Ken Coates); contains a transcript of an interview with Peirce by Moazzam Begg, "Punishing the innocent", as well as contributions from Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Darwish, Saifedean Ammous, Stephen F. Cohen, Andrew Mackinlay MP, Mahmoud Darwish, Jean Ziegler, James Petras, Mike Cooley, Trevor Griffiths, and Ann Talbot.
• Extradition: oral and written evidence, 18 January 2011: Ms Gareth Peirce, Solicitor to Mr Babar Ahmad, and Mr Ashfaq Ahmad; Mr Julian Knowles, Matrix Chambers. London: Stationery Office, 2011; ISBN 9780215556981. National government publication.
• Borderline justice: the fight for refugee and migrant rights. London: Pluto, 2012; ISBN 9780745331638 by Frances Webber (Peirce contributes a foreword).
• Setting the truth free: the inside story of the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign Dublin: Liberties, 2012; ISBN 9781907593376. By Julieann Campbell. Peirce contributes a foreword.
• From Belfast to Basra, and back again. Claygate, London: Grosvenor House, 2013; ISBN 9781781486528 by Susan McKay (Peirce contributes an introduction).

References

External links

• Gareth Peirce speech regarding Samar and Jawad, February 2000; accessed 6 August 2014.
• "This covert experiment in injustice", The Guardian, 4 February 2004; accessed 6 August 2014.
• "Was it like this for the Irish? Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain", London Review of Books, 10 April 2008; accessed 6 August 2014.
• "The Framing of al-Megrahi", London Review of Books, 24 September 2009; accessed 6 August 2014.
• Vanity Fair article on Mouloud Sihali (February 2008, No. 570); accessed 6 August 2014.
• "A Law unto Themselves", BBC Radio 4, Peirce interview with Baroness Kennedy, 4 August 2014; accessed 6 August 2014.