From The Silence of the Lambs - The Monthly, November 2021
"Most of my own working life has been spent in rapidly expanding not-for-profit legal services. Each position was advertised on the Ethical Jobs website, and each allowed me to avoid paying income tax on up to $15,900 each year, ostensibly as compensation for having forgone a higher salary somewhere else. Ironically, most junior lawyers in private law firms – especially doing criminal law – earn a lot less than I’ve been earning in funded legal services.
"One place I worked, set up more than 30 years ago by disability rights activists, was initially three staff and a volunteer board dedicated to changing the law to better protect people with disabilities. After two decades as a shoestring operation focused on law reform, it received state government funding to create first one legal service, then another. It began employing lawyers to appear with individual clients at mental health tribunals. By the time I started working there, the organisation’s legal services had expanded to practically overwhelm its law reform advocacy, a situation its director, who’d been there from the beginning, wasn’t happy about. But she’d been overridden by her board, which was keen to grow.
"I’d been a criminal defence lawyer, a role dedicated to protecting and pursuing individual clients’ rights through the legal system. I thought I’d be doing the same thing in mental health tribunals. But under the service agreement, the state government – through its justice department – paid my employer a set fee each time one of its lawyers appeared at the tribunal. Our employment contracts guaranteed us full-time salaries, but to “earn” the revenue to pay for them, we each needed to appear in about five tribunal hearings every week. Unsurprisingly, this translated into a kind of unofficial key performance indicator for us. And the fee stayed exactly the same, regardless of what happened to our clients.
"After trying and failing for a while to get the tribunal to revoke orders for clients who seemed very low risk, it seemed to me the mental health tribunal was getting the law wrong. The tribunal was mostly rubber-stamping psychiatrists’ applications, and keeping patients – our clients – on unnecessarily restrictive orders. I was working in a state that was among those most likely to detain people in hospitals for mandatory psychiatric
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Outrage as Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons expert on UK streets for a decade
An Iraqi scientist and former brigadier general who ran a lab in a chemical weapons factory under Saddam Hussein's murderous regime won the right to stay in Britain despite Priti Patel's bid to have him deported
One of Saddam's trusted scientists has been granted asylum
By Dan Warburton Reporter for the Sunday Mirror and People
20:26, 16 Oct 2021
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/outrage-saddam-husseins-chemical-weapons-25231746
A chemical weapons expert in Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime that gassed 100,000 people has been living in Britain for more than a decade.
The Iraqi scientist, a former brigadier general, claimed refugee status after arriving on a work visa.
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Colonel Hamish De Bretton Gordon is outraged that the Iraqi general is allowed to live here ( Image: Martin Bagott)
But former Army Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who advised the Iraqi Kurds on chemical weapons, said he found the ruling “staggering”.
He told the Sunday Mirror: “Asylum is there to protect people from persecution by rogue governments – not to protect rogue government employees from retribution from those who have suffered at their hands.
“I would not support his asylum for the heinous crimes he has been involved in. He might not be directly responsible but he is complicit. He should be tried at the International Criminal Court.”
ASA fled to Jordan before arriving in Britain in 2010. He came on a visa after landing a post as a researcher for a university in North West England, the court was told. He later claimed refugee status. When that was revoked by the Home Office he appealed.
The ruling in his favour came despite the court finding there were “serious reasons for considering he was responsible for committing a crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity”.
The judge was told ASA managed a lab at the Al Muthanna chemical weapons centre near Samarra from 1981 to 1988.
At the time Iraq was engaged in a campaign of bombing against Iran using agents such as mustard gas, sarin, tabun, CS and VX gas.
In 2003 – when Saddam Hussein was captured and hanged – ASA was identified as a high-ranking figure in the ruling Ba’ath Party, it was said.
**But he avoided punishment after giving information to US forces, helping them “unravel Saddam Hussein’s weapons projects”,
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