07 Apr Times Lawyer of the Week: Clare Jennings

Gold Jennings’ Lawyer and Director Clare Jennings has been named Times Lawyer of the Week following her work on behalf of asylum seekers who successfully challenged the government’s secret blanket policy of seizing mobile phones from small boat arrivals.

Last month the High Court ruled that the practice was unlawful and breached the Claimants’ Article 8 rights under the European Convention of Human Rights.

The Article highlights the extraordinary lengths Clare and her team went to in successfully bringing this judicial review. Clare explains that the biggest hurdle in bringing the claim was “Unearthing what the Home Office had been doing” because “Initially [the Home Office] denied having a policy of seizing phones; it admitted having this policy only after the court granted the judicial review permission to proceed. But even then, there were still huge gaps in what the Home Office told us, and we had to make numerous disclosure requests to get to the bottom of what had happened”.

Read the Times piece here.

For more information about the case read our piece here and the full judgment here.