Monday, December 10 at 2:00 pm
Human Rights Under Attack: Gareth Peirce on The New Dark Age
For more than 40 years, solicitor Gareth Peirce has fought to expose miscarriages of justice, and free the wrongfully accused and convicted.
As a young woman, she was a journalist covering Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States. Inspired by his example, she returned to London in 1970 to study law, specializing in human rights.
In her words, she represents: "individuals who are, or have been, the subject of rendition and torture, held in prison in the UK on the basis of secret evidence, and interned in secret prisons abroads under regimes that continue to practise torture."
Peirce was instrumental in freeing members of the Guildford Four, who were falsely convicted of carrying out an IRA bombing of a British pub. She also represented members of the Birmingham Six and was the solicitor for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
More recently, she has been representing members of the new suspect community — Muslims.
Peirce warns the erosion of human rights, under the guise of national security, has been a profound attack on democracy.
This episode features excerpts from Gareth Peirce's 2018 Sir Graham Day Lecture in Ethics, Morality and the Law, as well as a conversation with IDEAS producer Mary Lynk.
Gareth Peirce is a senior partner with the London Law firm, Birnberg Peirce and Partners. She is also the author of Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice.
To listen to the audio of “Human Rights Under Attack: Gareth Peirce on The New Dark Age” on Ideas From The CBC, please click HERE.