Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties

• We represent the United Kingdom’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Extraordinary Rendition, a cross-party parliamentary oversight body, in its efforts to seek information that will allow a systematic review of policies on extraordinary rendition. The work involves offices in London, New York, and Washington. D.C. We are counsel for the APPG in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed in December 2009 in federal court in Washington.
  
  
• With the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, and Refugio del Rio Grande, Inc., we settled a major litigation case in a Texas federal court against the U.S. Department of State, challenging its refusal to issue passports to persons of Latin American descent who were delivered by midwives in areas of Texas close to the Mexican border. This landmark agreement, approved in August 2009, provides greater fairness and transparency to the issuing of passports to U.S. citizens whose births were attended by midwives in Texas.
  
  
• In a case before the European Court of Human Rights on the right to an investigation of an unlawful death, we advised a client, a UK national, whose husband was murdered on a family holiday to France. We have also helped her in setting up Support after Manslaughter and Murder Abroad (SAMM Abroad), a not-for-profit group that assists families bereaved as a result of violence outside the UK.
  
  
• We have advised on compensation cases brought by victims of terrorism following the 7 July 2005 attacks in London. Beyond acting for victims and family members in individual cases, we took action to improve the systems designed to care for terrorism victims. We worked on research, policy, and legislative drafting in an effort that culminated in the announcement by the British Government in January 2010 that legislation is being put in place to compensate all future British victims of terrorism overseas. 
  
  
• With the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, the firm represents Derek Tice, one of a group of men from the U.S. Navy who were convicted of a rape and murder that the DNA and physical evidence overwhelmingly show they did not commit. After Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine granted conditional clemency to Tice and two others on 6 August 2009, they walked free from prison. Several weeks later, a federal court in Virginia granted our petition for habeas corpus relief. Our work continues to defend on appeal the order granting habeas relief and to clear Tice’s name. 
  
  
• With the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, we represent individuals who brought suit in a federal court against Nassau County and the Village of Garden City, New York, in litigation alleging discriminatory conduct over affordable housing that perpetuated racial segregation within Garden City, an affluent village in which a majority of residents are white. The claim stems from the planned sale and development of a county-owned, 25-acre piece of land in Garden City to a developer of luxury, single-family homes and townhouses. Plaintiffs allege that a rezoning of the village was intended to obstruct the construction of affordable housing and that, despite evidence of racial motivation, county authorities were complicit.
  
  
• We set a UK precedent in protecting the victims of crime by representing a client, a victim of rape, who cooperated with police to secure the conviction of the defendant.  The defendant appealed his conviction and, on acquittal, brought a civil action against our client for malicious prosecution. The Court of Appeal found that the defendant did not have an automatic right to bring an action for malicious prosecution against his victim, and the UK Supreme Court denied his application. Only six percent of rape cases in the UK lead to a conviction; had this case not been successful, future rape victims would have been further deterred from reporting incidents of rape.