TREASON

Human rights lawyers are not famous for their sense of humour. So it was something of a surprise to learn that the sour-faced solicitor Phil Shiner lists comedy as one of his hobbies. For the past decade, Shiner has made a handsome living suing the British taxpayer — at the British taxpayers’ expense. Shiner is head of the Birmingham-based Public Interest Lawyers (PIL). Shiner’s firm specialises in bringing actions against the British Army. Have you been tortured by a British soldier? You could be entitled to compensation. Shiner is always on the lookout for a jihadist with a grievance which can be used to discredit the Army and win some hard cash. Unlike Blame Direct and the rest of the ‘no win, no fee’ brigade, Shiner gets paid win, lose or draw. He is bankrolled out of the legal aid budget. Over the years he has secured £3?million compensation for his clients, mostly foreign nationals who have alleged abuse at the hands of British troops in Iraq. His work won him the prestigious accolade ‘Human Rights Lawyer of the Year’ in 2004. We don’t know how much he has earned, but legal aid fees clocked up in cases filed by PIL must run into millions. And at a time when the Government is attempting to bring under control the burgeoning £2billion legal aid budget, Shiner continues to thrive. This week Shiner turned up on Radio 4’s Today Programme peddling his latest crusade for truth and justice. He was given a prime platform by a gleeful BBC to denounce ‘Britain’s Guantanamo Bay’. Shiner claimed that dozens of Afghans are being held in a ‘secret prison’ at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province. He demanded they should be brought before a court or released. He said: ‘This is a secret facility that’s been used to unlawfully detain or intern up to 85 Afghans that they’ve kept secret, that Parliament doesn’t know about, that courts previously when they have interrogated issues like detention and internment in Afghanistan have never been told about — completely off the radar. ‘And people will be wondering if these detainees are being treated humanely and in accordance with international law.’ This must be where Shiner’s legendary sense of humour comes into play. He should know full well that this isn’t a ‘secret prison’. And he is aware that the Army has been trying to get rid of these prisoners for years. Back in 2010, Britain wanted to hand over the detainees to the Afghan justice system. Eventually the High Court in London ruled that they could not be transferred to the Afghans because they might be tortured, which would breach their human rites. Far from being ‘detained unlawfully’ they are being held in British custody on the specific orders of a British court. You’d expect Shiner to know that. Because in 2010, the original Camp Bastion case was brought by, you guessed, one Phil Shiner. On legal aid, natch. So how does he explain telling the BBC this was a ‘secret camp’, ‘off the radar’, that the courts haven’t been told about? Now, three years later, he’s heading back to court to argue that the detainees should be put on trial or set free. Talk about playing both ends. Like Boris Johnson, Shiner appears to be pro-having cake and pro-eating it. But thanks to the success of his earlier lawsuit, the High Court has ruled the prisoners can’t be entrusted to the Afghan legal system. Since Shiner doesn’t approve of military justice, that means they would have to be released back into the local community, where they would be at liberty to resume their terrorist activities. In comedy, as in life, timing is everything.

FACES OF LEFT WING TRAITORS

A man arrested after appearing on the BBC's Newsnight programme has been charged with three terrorism offences. Abu Nusaybah, 30, from east London, was held after giving an interview about his friend, Michael Adebolajo, one of the suspects in the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich.
The charges, which he denies, relate to videos of lectures and written material. They are not linked to the death of Drummer Rigby on 22 May 2013. Abu Nusaybah, who has been charged under his real name of Ibrahim Abdullah-Hassan, appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court for a brief hearing. He was remanded in custody and is due to appear at the Old Bailey on 28 June.

Taxpayes money funded a team of lawyers fighting European Court of Human Rights cases on behalf of foreign criminals and illegal immigrants. The human rights quango the Equality and Human Rights Commission quietly gave nearly £200,000 to a pressure group so it could take controversial human rights cases to the court in Strasbourg. The group, the AIRE Centre (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe), used the money to fight and win a series of cases and represented among others a Nigerian rapist and two Somali criminals who won the right to stay in Britain.

The cases were picked as part of a policy of ‘strategic litigation’ designed to overturn ministerial decisions and rulings made in British courts, and to extend equality and human rights laws in favour of immigrants and criminals. The centre – a registered charity – was in the news yesterday as the source of the legal complaint against Britain for restricting access to our benefits system.

It brought test cases arguing for the right of EU immigrants not to have to undergo a residency test before they can claim a host of benefits. Now an investigation has revealed further funding, by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Over three years, from April 2009 to April 2012, the AIRE Centre received £185,906. The money was for a project designed to get around a ban on Government legal aid funding for cases at the European Court of Human Rights. The centre used the money to hire staff and recruit lawyers to bring cases before the court. One major case it won involved two Somali criminals who won the right to stay in Britain and, crucially, led to a ruling which shackled ministers in their efforts to send home dozens of other Somali criminals living here.

Another involved a Nigerian rapist whose deportation was blocked by Strasbourg because of his right to a ‘private and family life’ under the European Convention on Human Rights.

OBSESSED with the ideology of diversity, our political masters have not only allowed the immigration rate to reach more than 500,000 arrivals every single year, but also have refused to demand that newcomers accept the British way of life. Instead immigrants have been encouraged to cling to their own cultures and customs. During their 13 years of misrule, Labour was particularly enthusiastic about enforcing this destructive strategy, partly through their instinctive loathing for their own country, which they liked to portray as outdated and racist, and partly through their desire to expand their client army of supporters, given that 80 per cent of immigrants vote Labour.

What is so tragic is that a party of the Left, trumpeting its supposedly liberal credentials, should have pursued a policy that is so fundamentally illiberal. Labour's fixation with identity politics and mass immigration had led to the import of deeply reactionary, anti-democratic, superstitious tribalism on an epic scale. There is nothing liberal about what is now happening in many of our inner cities. Tower Hamlets in east London, where white Britons make up just 30 per cent of the population, has seen patrols by Muslim vigilantes who have attacked women for dressing "inappropriately" and put up stickers declaring the area "a gay free zone". The same spirit of misogyny can be also be seen in the growing number of sharia courts, which treat women as second-class citizens, and in the gangs of Muslim men in such places as Oxford, Telford and Derby, preying on young white girls. The same collapse of liberal values can be seen in the urban breakdown of democracy. Fraud perpetrated by ethnic minority "community leaders" and politicians is now rife, helped by lax rules on postal voting introduced by Labour. At the same time political correctness has fuelled the thuggish far-Right as seen last weekend in the English Defence League marches in Newcastle and London. Freedom of speech is also in danger, thanks to the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists at anything they regard as blasphemous.

In this disturbing climate of fear, where publishers can be firebombed and writers subjected to fatwas, self-censorship about Islam is almost universal. It is the same story with the principle of equality before the law. In the cowardly world of political correctness, double standards are rife. Christians are regularly subjected to institutionalised bullying over the symbols of their belief, yet the state bends over backwards to accommodate other faiths. Similarly, the state does nothing to stop Muslim extremists such as Anjem Choudary spouting often violent slogans but would not dream of tolerating such hate speech in others. The destruction of liberalism also works on a deeper level. Precisely because the multicultural experiment is failing so disastrously, the machinery of the state is now used to enforce the official orthodoxy and suppress dissent.

The lawyers want more asylum seekers here as they are a big meal ticket for them with the legal aid  they can claim.

FACTS ON THE P.C LAWYERS