Lawyer to watch: Ruth Brander

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/may/10/lawyer-to-watch-ruth-brander

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Maya Sikand says: "You won't necessarily have heard of Ruth, as she is very understated. I first met her when she came to do pupillage at Garden Court just over a decade ago now. She did a piece of work for me and I knew immediately she was one to watch. She has a quiet but incredible intelligence and is utterly dedicated to civil liberties work. When she first joined Doughty Street as a tenant she worked as a junior on a number of high profile cases challenging the mandatory nature of the death penalty in the Caribbean. She did hours and hours of very difficult drafting brilliantly and on an entirely pro bono basis – something young barristers can ill afford. Glance at her recent achievements and you will see that her commitment has not wavered – despite now being the mother of two toddlers."

From an early age, Ruth Brander would accompany her parents on demonstrations, so as a newly-qualified barrister it felt like a natural progression to begin representing defendants in magistrates' courts on protest-related charges. She had previously worked at JUSTICE for a year and gone on to do an internship in Jamaica, which is one of the Caribbean countries to have kept the death penalty. The experience eventually led to her involvement in three key constitutional challenges to the death penalty, Trimmingham v R (St Vincent and the Grenadines) [2009] UKPC 25; Bowe and Davis v R [2006] UKPC 10 and Boyce & Joseph v R (2005) 1 AC 400. These, she says, have been the highlights of her career. "It used to be that there was an automatic death sentence for a murder conviction. With a series of cases, we managed to restrict the use of the death penalty."

Not that Brander believes the judicial committee of the privy council in London, which is the final court of appeal for many current and former Commonwealth countries, is the only safeguard against the use of the death penalty. Whether these states abandon the privy council route is "something that's for these countries to decide." She believes it's a "false dilemma" to back the privy council's involvement on the basis that an ultimate court of appeal in the Caribbean would allow more executions: "There have been some very good decisions from the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights."

As for the right to protest, she says, recent judgments have tended to go against protesters - such as the Strasbourg kettling judgment and the eviction of the Occupy camp from outside St Paul's. She is confident the "tightening" will ease eventually, but security concerns over big events like the Olympics, the Jubilee and last year's royal wedding have led to the police preventing protests - even fancy-dress stunts - from taking place at all. "At what point can you intervene pre-emptively? One of the cases that I'm working on at the moment is a challenge to arrests made on the day of the royal wedding. The claimants are arguing that while the police are entitled to act to prevent a breach of the peace, in this case they were over-zealous in suppressing oppositional views to the royal wedding." The claimants hope the case, which should reach court at the end of May, will come in time to prevent similar action being taken during the Jubilee.

Celebrates winning a case by "wandering aimlessly for a while, especially on a sunny day. If I've been in the Royal Courts of Justice I'll probably just be wandering around that area. Being a mother of two young children, I rarely have the chance to be on my own."

Currently acting in R (Hicks) v Met Police Commr; R (Pearce) v Met Police Commissioner - challenges to pre-emptive royal wedding arrests