If ever there was a gold-standard argument for a sustainable system of public legal funding, then this book is it. It should be compulsory reading for every lord chancellor, no matter how brief their tenure. It is also a shocking account of how those in power in the UK brutally abuse the vulnerable with impunity. Then Wistrich sues them and you want to cheer out loud.

In each highly accessible and beautifully written chapter, she carefully explains the basis on which she became instructed and how each case progressed. She also provides a masterclass on handling the media in high-profile cases.

Each chapter demonstrates how she has held institutions to account, starting with the Metropolitan Police and the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. She describes how a comment, taken out of context, was made to sound like a call for Met Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair to resign, and how she learned from this (during the lifetime of the case, he did in fact stand down). There is a lovely description of her flying visit to Brazil to discuss the killing with the family and to explain the legal process, and of a party they attended held at Wistrich’s home, revealing her evident warmth and empathy towards those lucky enough to have her in their corner. She describes a secretly introduced shoot-to-kill policy brought in by the police, which resulted in almost no prosecutions being brought against them. Indeed, none were prosecuted in this case, but a prosecution was brought against the Met commissioner under Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1984 s3.

Her commitment and tenacity in the face of barrier after barrier, and statutory bodies stonewalling attempts to reveal the truth behind the killing of an innocent man, finally ended, after nine years, in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, albeit unsuccessfully (Da Silva v UK App No 5878/08, 30 March 2016; June 2016 Legal Action 28).

Wistrich’s strong sense of fairness and justice also runs through every word about the campaign to close Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre. The vast majority of detainees in Yarl’s Wood were and are women. She describes with brutal clarity the (now abolished) detained fast track system for determining asylum claims, where, with a 99 per cent rejection rate, the odds could not be any more stacked against vulnerable detainees. She reveals in shocking detail the abuse of detainees by staff, the unlawful use of detention in breach of the Immigration Rules, and an incident when protesting detainees were locked in the facility when it was on fire – under orders of the custody officers! She sees the cruel underside of our society, which is totally unknown to the vast majority of us, and how the law is ridden roughshod over – it’s like the Wild West and everyone should know about it. She describes a regime that is the definition of inhumanity, typified by the personal history she recounts of her client, Patience, from Uganda.

She decided to give the Home Office a detailed dossier of the abuse at Yarl’s Wood. Forty-eight case studies were collected to demonstrate the reality of the immigration detention experience, highlighting a scandal, denied by those in power, and described as a ‘preventable national disgrace’ by Lord Ramsbotham in his foreword to the subsequent report.2Harriet Wistrich, Dr Frank Arnold and Emma Ginn, Outsourcing abuse: the use and misuse of state-sanctioned force during the detention and removal of asylum seekers, Birnberg Peirce & Partners/Medical Justice/National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, 2008, page 1.

The account of the brutally violent response to detainees peacefully protesting about their treatment by Serco sounds like a scene from a war zone. Women and children were among those attacked. Anyone reading this would support the closure of Yarl’s Wood, yet in 2024 it is still in use.

The case of John Worboys first appears in chapter 4, ‘Challenging the failure to investigate’, in which Wistrich describes how she and Phillippa Kaufmann KC took on the Met Police and the Home Office on behalf of two of Worboys’ victims. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in a game-changing win (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v DSD and NBV [2018] UKSC 11; June 2018 Legal Action 24) that is now the precedent in sexual offences cases.

Worboys was to crop up again, only nine months later, when the Parole Board was reported to have determined that he was now safe to return to society. Some 105 victims had come forward in the wake of his conviction. Most people will remember the outcry at what was perceived to be an unthinkable decision on the part of the Parole Board, and a devastating one for his multiple victims. The then justice secretary, David Gauke, said he would challenge the decision via judicial review until, Wistrich surmises, he was advised that it would be a conflict if interest for him to do so. She again details how the press and the law were used in tandem to alert the public to this, and how she actually had to crowdfund to cover the potential costs to her two clients should they lose the case, though she and Kaufmann were prepared to take the hit and not get paid if that were to happen. They were, of course, successful (R (DSD and NBV and others) v Parole Board of England and Wales and Secretary of State for Justice [2018] EWHC 694 (Admin); July/August 2018 Legal Action 31).

Other chapters deal with the ‘Spy cops’ scandal, in which undercover police officers had relationships with the women on whom they were ‘spying’ (and in some cases had children with them), before suddenly disappearing back to their ‘real lives and families’. There is probably Wistrich’s most well-known case, which led to the quashing of Sally Challen’s original murder conviction (R v Challen [2019] EWCA Crim 916), retrial for manslaughter and subsequent release, on the basis of the new law and growth of understanding of coercive control, which was not available when she was originally tried and sentenced. There is the restoration of the legal reputation of women sexually exploited as children. Each case is as remarkable and impressive as the last.

Wistrich’s energy and compassion seem limitless. Her father was a refugee, as were her mother’s parents; her parents took in the Patels, thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin with only what they stood up in. With this in mind, it is easy to see where her drive comes from, and so many have benefited from it. She has saved lives.

The book is an abject lesson in not giving up fighting when you know something is wrong. She is a hero, an inspiration. Every aspiring lawyer, and anyone interested in justice, should read this book, get angry and join the fight.