Aamer Anwar

Over the last 30 years, Aamer Anwar has built a fearsome reputation as a human rights lawyer, giving a voice to the voiceless, shaking the very foundations of our legal system. A childhood scarred by violence in Liverpool, followed by a racist beating at the hands of the Glasgow police turned a left-wing student into a firebrand lawyer.

Loathed by the establishment, Aamer has carved a name for himself in legal history whether he is fighting miscarriages of justice, death row cases, taking on the USA military in court, appealing the Lockerbie bombing, defending a Catalan minister from the Spanish government, campaigning over prison suicides, or bringing killers to justice decades later.

Aamer has stood shoulder to shoulder with grieving families when the legal system has failed them; His reputation as a human rights lawyer has grown since the premiere of Everyone to Kenmure Street at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary charted Anwar’s fraught negotiations that freed two asylum seekers, detained by the Home Office, from a van surrounded by police who were encircled by thousands of protestors in a Glasgow street. Aamer already has two hit series of the BBC’s fly-on-the-wall documentary ‘The Firm’ which focused on his work and legal firm- earning him the title of ‘street-fighting lawyer.’