The privilege of acting for bereaved families
Raju Bhatt, recognised for outstanding achievement at this year’s Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year (LALY) awards, may not think of himself as ‘a real lawyer’, but his victories against state bodies are genuine enough. Fiona Bawdon spoke to him.
In 1989, when Raju Bhatt went to visit a client in Hoxton, east London, he had to be met at nearby Old Street station by a ‘posse’, to ensure his safe conduct to the estate where the man lived. ‘Someone with my skin colour wouldn’t have been safe,’ says Ugandan-born Raju Bhatt. ‘It was all NF [National Front] territory.’
Given his unpromising introduction to the area, it is perhaps surprising that nine years later he and Fiona Murphy chose Hoxton as the place to open the doors of their new civil liberties firm, Bhatt Murphy. ‘We came here because it was the cheapest part of London,’ he says.
Even more surprising is that the area that was once the cheapest part of London is now (to quote one London guidebook) the ‘trendiest place in the capital, a Mecca for skinny jeans, checked shirts, ironic haircuts, edgy art galleries and hip bars that play music that will only become fashionable in about six months’ time’. In 2003, the firm moved a few hundred yards from its original office in Pitfield Street to Hoxton Square, giving it one of the hippest addresses in London (a few doors away from the White Cube gallery, until the latter moved elsewhere).
Raju Bhatt is now more likely to have to run the gauntlet of revellers sporting Hoxton fin haircuts than shaven-headed neo-fascists. ‘You can’t get a decent beer anywhere any more. It’s all wine bars,’ he says.
Holding the state to account
While the surrounding area may have become gentrified, Bhatt Murphy remains solidly committed to its legal aid origins. The now 35-strong firm is best known for actions against the police and challenges to abuse of state power. Raju Bhatt himself has brought a string of restraint-related death-in-custody cases, which have led to significant changes in police and Crown Prosecution Service procedure. Over the years, he has taken on some of the most powerful state institutions – the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the Ministry of Defence, and the Security Service. In 2010, the Home Secretary appointed him to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, which was, he says, a bit of an eye-opener. ‘The Home Office is usually the adversary in the work I do. Yet, here, the same civil servants who can be so obstructive were facilitating what we were doing, and were very, very able individuals,’ he says.
Although the impact of Raju Bhatt’s work on civil liberties has arguably been as significant as that of, say, Gareth Peirce or Louise Christian, he remains relatively unknown, even within the profession itself. When he was announced as a winner at this year’s LALY awards, some in the audience muttered that they had never heard of him. Maybe so. But they will have heard of his clients; the young black men who died while being restrained in custody: Alton Manning, Roger Sylvester, Ibrahima Sey, Shiji Lapite.
While Raju Bhatt is comfortable staying largely under the radar – claiming he does not think of himself as a lawyer, and dislikes the sound of his own voice – he may have to get more used to the spotlight. In May this year, the Home Secretary announced an inquiry into one of his longest running cases, the 1987 murder of private detective Daniel Morgan, found with an axe in his head in a south London car park. Scotland Yard has already accepted that police corruption helped shield his killer, and one former officer says the review, by former Appeal Court judge Sir Stanley Burnton, will expose Metropolitan Police corruption, in the way the Macpherson inquiry exposed its racism.
Raju Bhatt has acted for the Morgan family for around 15 years and has watched them grow old with the case. ‘I was with them yesterday. The victim’s mother was younger than I am now when Daniel died. She’s now in her 80s and quite frail. They talk about how their lives have been colonised by the state, because of its failures,’ he says.
Drawing strength from clients
Raju Bhatt may not feel himself to be a ‘real lawyer’, but he certainly has impeccable civil liberties credentials. His family came to the UK from Uganda in 1972 as refugees; within 24 hours of arriving, he was beaten up (he recalls that a police car drove past, but did not stop). He cut his political teeth supporting people arrested in the 1981 riots, and subsequently helped set up the Southall police monitoring group (with funding from ‘Red Ken’s’ Greater London Council). He went to law school in his late 20s – where he experienced blatant prejudice from a Monday Club-supporting tutor – before being articled to Benedict Birnberg, who also launched the careers of Gareth Peirce, Imran Khan and Paul Boateng.
For all this, he is not an obvious firebrand, or tub-thumper. Raju Bhatt is quietly spoken, and even his response to the legal aid cuts, which will badly affect his firm (particularly in relation to prison law and judicial review), is measured. Where many critics of the changes (understandably) paint an apocalyptic picture of their impact, Raju Bhatt says simply: ‘We will still do the work. We are determined to find a way. It’ll be done by us just tightening our belts that much further.’
Accepting his LALY award in July, Raju Bhatt said that legal aid lawyers owed it to their clients to carry on, despite ‘unprecedented challenges’. ‘Their particular struggle in the face of adversity is a source of our own strength in our struggle to continue with the work,’ he told the audience. Later, he described his relationship with clients as ‘parasitic’ – meaning he draws strength from them, rather than the other way round.
Nor is Raju Bhatt a fan of conspiracy theories: ‘More often than not, it is cock up, not conspiracy.’ He adds: ‘A prerequisite to sanity is to look for explanations other than conspiracy. It is only if there is no alternative, only if there is no option but to confront a conspiracy, that one does so.’ He even hesitates to use the term ‘cover up’ to describe the police response to the Hillsborough disaster, believing what happened was down to cowardice and bad decisions, rather than deliberate wickedness. ‘Cover up suggests conspiracy. It’s usually just an instinct, and these things build up. If Hillsborough were to happen again, the challenge would be one of leadership. If the message from the top was we have to try to limit the damage by pointing the finger elsewhere, then that is how the rank and file would operate.’
Many of the cases he deals with involve the deaths of young men, often in the most squalid and distressing circumstances imaginable. Invariably, it is the sisters and mothers who find their way to Raju Bhatt’s door, seeking some kind of explanation or accountability from the state.
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John Howard, LALYs 2013 compère (left) and Lord Justice McFarlane, presenter (right) with Raju Bhatt
© ROBERT ABERMAN
Despite changes in law and policy over recent years, Raju Bhatt believes that most state bodies still only pay lip service to the notion of involving families in the process. ‘Twenty years on from Macpherson, state agencies seem to think family liaison is about managing and controlling those families, rather than facilitating their participation, which requires providing information.’ Improvements in inquest funding and disclosure mean that families will now eventually get to see a report of the investigation into a death, ‘if only to see how crap that investigation was’. ‘The quality of the investigation has not improved, but the ability to see that it was crap is important. It allows us to challenge the flaws.’
Raju Bhatt says: ‘We are dealing with clients in the depths of despair. It’s some of the most draining work, but also some of the most invigorating and inspiring.’ While he rejects glib notions of ‘closure’, even relatives who appear completely broken, rendered almost catatonic by grief, can find some small solace in the inquest process, he believes.
The memory of one bereaved mother remains particularly powerful. ‘The mum was in pieces. There was an inquest lasting seven weeks, the sisters are there with her, and she’s just sitting there every day. And I don’t really see any sign, any spark of life in her, until the jury finally come back with the verdict of unlawful killing. And I suddenly realise, there’s movement from her – otherwise there was never any movement – and I look, and she’s standing with her arms aloft. A couple of weeks later, she dies. It was like she just dragged herself [to the inquest]. That’s what I mean about the privilege of what we do.’
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