Gareth Peirce

Gareth Peirce (born c. 1940) is an English solicitor, and was educated at the independent Cheltenham Ladies' College, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. She discarded her birth name of "Jean" when she was quite young, taking "Gareth" as her legal name. She is noted for taking on controversial cases, including high profile human rights issues. Her clients include the Birmingham Six, the Tipton Three, the Guildford Four, former MI5 operative David Shayler, Abu Qatada (who has been called 'Europe's Al-Qaeda Ambassador'), Judith Ward, Mouloud Sihali, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, Mozzam Begg and Bisher Amin Khalil al-Rawi, a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

In the mid 1970's Gareth Peirce supported specific campaigns for reform of laws and police procedures that permitted the wrongful prosecution and conviction of persons solely on identification evidence. Individual cases that were then very much in the news - such as the George Davis Is Innocent Campaign alongside numerous others countrywide soon led to the establishment of Justice Against the Identification Laws (J.A.I.L.), an organisation which Gareth Peirce supported. (See: "IDENTIFICATION EVIDENCE - Practices and Malpractices: A report by JAIL" by Martin Walker and Bernadette Brittain. (1978)).

In the 1960s, she worked as a journalist in the United States, following the campaign of Martin Luther King; when she returned to Britain in the 1970s, after having married Bill Peirce, the son of the American painter Waldo Peirce, she took a postgraduate law degree at the London School of Economics. She joined the firm of the radical solicitor Benedict Birnberg as a trainee, and was admitted to the Roll of Solicitors on December 15, 1978.

She was appointed CBE in 1999, but later she returned its insignia. She is currently a senior partner at Birnberg Peirce and Partners, and lives in Kentish Town, north London, with her husband. They have two adult sons. In the film "In the Name of the Father", Peirce was portrayed by Emma Thompson (though Thompson's character was actually a composite of several lawyers who worked on the case, including Peirce).

Peirce was one of the initial eight people inducted in March 2007 into Justice Denied magazine's [http://justicedenied.org/issue/issue_35/jd_issue_35.pdf Hall of Honor] , for her lifetime achievement in aiding the wrongly convicted.

Publications

* [http://www.freesaj.org.uk/hcfeb2000_speeches/peirce.htm Gareth Peirce's speech on Samar and Jawad]
* [http://www.statewatch.org/news/2004/feb/09gp-guardian.htm This covert experiment in injustice] , The Guardian (February 4, 2004)
* [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/peir01_.html Was it like this for the Irish? Gareth Peirce on the position of Muslims in Britain] , London Review of Books (April 10, 2008)

External links

* [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/21/ncop121.xml Profile in The Telegraph article] (August 21, 2005)
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3497942.stm BBC Profile of Gareth Peirce]
* [http://www.lexonthenet.co.uk/news.php?contentid=29921&include=lft_menu_home LEX profile of radical lawyers]
* [http://justicedenied.org/issue/issue_35/jd_issue_35.pdf Justice Denied's article about Gareth Peirce in Issue 36 (Winter 2007)]
* [http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=685&topicId=14288&docId=l:743470347&start=1 Vanity Fair's article on Mouloud Sihali, Feb 2008, No. 570]