Scotland's Leading Human Rights Lawyer Stops By Sallies Quad

When he isn’t advocating in Scotland’s highest-profile criminal trials, or starring in an eight-part BBC docuseries, or winning Scottish Solicitor of the Year (twice), Aamer Anwar — dubbed “Scotland’s leading human rights lawyer” by The Guardian — likes to talk about his job. As dusk fell on Sallies Quad two weeks ago, he came to School VI to do just that.

Anwar, born in Liverpool, came to Glasgow in the ‘90s to initially study mechanical engineering. Then, one night, he was beaten unconscious in a racially motivated police attack. He thought he was going to die; for days after the attack he ate pulverised hospital food through a straw. After he recovered, Anwar was discouraged from legal action; he was told about the abysmal success rates of ethnic minorities who sue the police. He wasn’t deterred — in fact, he abandoned engineering and switched to law.

In 1998, Anwar heard about the racist murder of British Sikh Surjit Sing Chhokar. The night of Chhokar’s death, three men were arrested. "The family was told not to worry: justice would be done,” Anwar remembered. “Within a few days, two of the men were back on the street.” Anwar, still in law school, turned up on the Chhokar family’s doorstep and asked if he could represent them. The family agreed, and Anwar began a fight he thought would take a few months, maybe a year. The case would last through three retrials, two inquiries, a public campaign mobilising thousands, debates in the Scottish parliament and a change to an 800-year-old legal precedent. It took 18 years before, on the steps of the Glasgow High Court, he could tell the media that justice had been done to Chhokar’s killers. 

The Chhokar case is only one of the numerous high-profile, years-long legal battles Anwar has waged. The BBC is currently following two of Anwar & Co’s ongoing legal battles for The Firm, a docuseries focussing on Anwar’s advocacy for bereaved families in the Scottish and UK Covid-19 Inquiries, as well as his representation of the family of Sheku Bayoh, a black man from Fife who died after being restrained by police officers in 2015. The Firm airs this October.

Many of Anwar’s most high-profile cases, including the Chhokar case, were pro bono. If you want to go into human rights work, Anwar warned, “there’s no money.” That doesn’t mean law is only for the already well-heeled; when Anwar’s firm recruits, what “shines out” on CVs isn’t “taking a gap year,” or the “cheese and wine society” — it’s your “story,” he said. 

Anwar is especially interested in applicants who overcame “horrific circumstances.” Once the interns are chosen, Anwar can pretty quickly pick out the “brilliant.” “Anyone who gets handed an unpleasant job and says ‘I’m not doing that’ is going to get dropped pretty quickly.” 

A lot of Anwar’s talk went beyond his legal work. He discussed the Israel-Hamas war: “You had Biden just yesterday rustle up billions to incinerate people, but not to feed them,” he said. “As a lawyer, I describe it as genocide. I describe it as an Apartheid system.” He touched on domestic politics, too: “Taking a flight three, four thousand miles away? You could just go to a [council housing] scheme in Glasgow and see how horrific it is,” he said. “I think every politician in this country should spend a month in a scheme.” 

Aamer, whose parents immigrated from Pakistan, talked about how Britain’s imperial history is intimately linked to present-day immigration. “People say, ‘why are they coming to this country?’” Anwar said. “They’re coming to this country because we invaded those countries four hundred years ago. We sucked every resource out of them.” 

“[Without Commonwealth troops] we wouldn’t have won the [Second World] War [...] but until very recently you didn’t even have memorials for people who came from the Commonwealth who had fought,” he added. “They sacrificed — they died in the First World War, they died in the Second World War, and it shouldn’t be forgotten.” 

Anwar pointed to Gian Singh, who fought in both World Wars for Britain and was personally awarded the Victoria Cross — Britain’s highest military honour — by King George VI for single-handedly charging and capturing a Japanese anti-tank gun. Gian Singh’s great-grandson was Surjit Singh Chhokar.

After the final Chhokar trial in 2016, Anwar called the Scottish legal establishment a “gentleman's colonial club.” He stands by that, he told us last week. There’s still a “layer of dinosaurs” at the top of the legal system in many ways — since the ‘90s the system “actually hasn't changed that much,” Anwar said. During the trial, Chhokar’s bereaved father asked Anwar, “Do these guys still think that this is the British Raj?” 

The charges are in no small part thanks to Anwar. His advocacy has set precedent after precedent: Chhokar’s killer was the second person ever to be sentenced under the newly changed Double Jeopardy laws; Anwar’s fight to hold the police to account for his hospitalisation in the ‘90s has made him the “only person of colour in this country to win a civil action case against the police”; Anwar’s ongoing advocacy on behalf of Sheku Bayoh’s family has so far led to the chief constable of Police Scotland admitting that the force is institutionally racist.

Chhokar's father died a year before the 2016 trial. He did not live to see his son’s killers brought to justice. Nicola Sturgeon wrote the surviving family a condolence letter, and during the funeral procession, the Justice Secretary and the Chief Constable walked alongside Anwar and the surviving family of Surjit Singh Chhokar.

“It’s the families. The families keep me going,” Anwar said. “They get up in the morning, despite their pain, their grief, the heartache, the shattering of the soul. [...] If they can do that, in the midst of their grief, then what am I being asked to do? Not very much.”

Photo by Wikimedia Commons