At 41 he talks with a boyish, enthusiastic energy, bouncing from topic to topic: the draconianism of legislation during the Second World War; his work acting for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism in the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s investigation into the Labour Party; the significance of the Reclaim These Streets verdict. Wagner represented this women’s rights group against the Metropolitan Police, who refused to authorise a vigil for Sarah Everard in March 2021. That decision was found to be unlawful – a ruling he believes is crucial to protecting civil liberties. “Protest is the basic currency of a democracy, even in a dangerous pandemic.” In some rare cases, such as with hotel quarantine, MPs have been allowed, usually 24 hours before it coming into force, a prior debate and vote on secondary legislation, but there is no opportunity to amend. The result, Wagner says, is “a sham debate, and a sham approval, because when you’ve got a big majority for the government, the prospect of MPs actually voting it down and risking being blamed for Covid variants entering the country is zero”. Free expression and the right to protest are areas of particular interest to Adam. He has acted in a number of the recent leading cases relating protest, including acting for women’s rights organisation Reclaim These Streets in the leading case on protest rights in the pandemic, relating to the Metropolitan Police’s response to the Sarah Everard vigil ( Leigh and Others), in the first Court of Appeal judgment on protesters held in contempt of court ( Cuadrilla Bowland Ltd & Ors v Lawrie & Ors ), and the follow-up Court of Appeal case relating to protest against the HS2 railway ( Cuciurean v HS2) .

Emergency State: How We lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters is a book by UK human rights lawyer Adam Wagner. [1] [2] The book explores how the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated Government response had unprecedented powers to make and change legislation at will without accountability and what safeguards could be created to prevent this in the future. [3] Wagner was appointed to work on the Independent Commission on UK Public Health Emergency Powers. [3] [4] A riveting account of how our democracy was put under threat during the Pandemic and why we must never let the Emergency State - all-powerful but ignorant and corrupt - take over again' - Lady Hale, former President of the UK Supreme Court It is specious, secondly, because the critical decisions were made by ministers, who were not epidemiologists either. The advice that they received from Sage was published online and the more respectable reasons for ministerial decisions were usually set out in public statements. Wagner has exactly the same qualifications to pronounce on those decisions as ministers had to make them: he can read and he can count. Instead, he prefers to leave it to the Government’s ­specialist advisers. Adam Wagner has written a very interesting, highly readable and thought-provoking book about law and the pandemic, based on his professional experience in a number of important court challenges to aspects of the restrictions, not just as an ordinary citizen. I’m very late to review it, but I recommend it. If you have an interest in law you really should read it. Inquest into the death of Terry Perkins (2019) - Acted for the family in an inquest relating to the death in prison of the ringleader of the Hatton Garden robbery ( Press coverage)Fascinating. An invaluable service to historians of the pandemic, and a passionate and compelling argument for the rule of law' - Baron Danny Finkelstein

Even his gripe (fully justified in my view) about the absence of ­parliamentary oversight amounts to very little, since the Opposition’s support for even tougher measures ensured that they would be voted through anyway. Wagner’s explanation for this curious evasion is that, not being an epidemiologist, he is unqualified to pronounce on the question of justification. This is something that we often hear, but it is ­specious, as he must surely realise. The review went down well with some, with lawyer Gavin John Adams describing it as a “marvellous piece of literary criticism” and another tweeter calling it “completely delicious”. In the first chapter, Wagner introduces the concept of the Emergency State, the manner in which the State functions during an existential crisis such as famine, pandemic, or war drawing comparison to other historic crises. [1] :9,16 2 Very Strong Measures [ edit ]There will be other pandemics. We will have a lot more of what Wagner rightly condemns if people are as willing as he is to surrender their humanity to technocrats. Stephen Helm v SSJ [2016] CO/5780/2016. Acted successfully for a prisoner in a challenge to the SSJ’s pilot policy of automatically preventing oral Parole Board hearings being held if a recalled prisoner has 24 weeks or less from their Sentence Expiry Date

Adam is a passionate advocate, educator and writer on human rights. He founded and chairs the muti-award winning human rights education charity EachOther, set up the widely-read UK Human Rights Blog and hosts the UK’s leading human rights podcast, the Better Human Podcast. He regularly speaks on human rights law to charities, parliamentary committees and government departments and is a Visiting Professor of Law at Goldsmiths University where he teaches undergraduate students. He is the Consultant Editor of the 2020 Prison Law edition of Halsbury’s Laws of England and regularly writes for the New Statesman, Prospect and appears on TV and radio. Astonishing. Detailed, dispassionate and definitive. An urgent warning and work of major importance', James O'Brien He’s also balanced. He accepts that it was very difficult for government and police to get to get everything right, especially when time was critical with lives at stake; and doesn’t suggest any country obviously did much better. Unfair, this book isn’t. But that thoroughly sensible view is obscured by some mixed messages. They make “Emergency State” ultimately an ambiguous, conflicted book that sometimes evades key questions, unjustifiably implying more than it justifiably says.

Who is John Galt? If you want to understand different ideas of freedom, and particularly “muscular individualism”, you can do a lot worse than read Rand’s bombastic and messy opus. There is no danger of Rand concealing her political philosophy – it is woven into the fabric of the book and in the brash symbolism of its characters: socialism and collectivism bad; individualism and free expression of talent good. You may not agree with the destination, but the ride is worth taking. Mr. Ricardo Orlando Saunders v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2018] successfully acted for the Appellant in an Article 8 ECHR appeal against the refusal to grant him leave to remain – the Tribunal ruled that he was deeply involved in his family’s lives and so should be granted leave Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust Inquiry: acted for the Department of Health in an investigation into systemic failings in the NHS I must mention his conclusion that we need a written constitution. This is a standard demand of centre-left liberals and many public and human rights lawyers, but there’s really nothing about the pandemic that suggests we need one, or would be better off with one. Wagner admits that restrictions were more, not less, rigorously enforced in some other European countries with written constitutions. Just as a history of the time, it is an important reminder of the period but also how government can take advantage of situations. That the UK had Boris Johnson as PM was, for many people, a disaster. Those people included the more than 200,000 that died from Covid19 infection where government imposed unbelieveably hard to understand laws, with haphazard changes, implemented as laws and guidelines where few understood the difference. The few did not include most of the UK police force that ruled on guidelines (against the law) and imposed fines on many that did not warrant them.