Gareth Peirce

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Gareth Peirce (born c. 1940) is a British solicitor. 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 Guildford Four, former MI5 operative David Shayler, Abu Qatada (who has been called 'Europe's Al-Qaeda Ambassador'), Judith Ward, the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, Mozzam Begg and Bisher Amin Khalil al-Rawi, a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

Peirce was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and the University of Oxford. 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 awarded the CBE in 1999, but later returned it. 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).

[edit] Publications

• Gareth Peirce's speech on Samar and Jawad
• This covert experiment in injustice, The Guardian (February 4, 2004)

[edit] External links

• Profile in The Telegraph article (August 21, 2005)
• BBC Profile of Gareth Peirce
• LEX profile of radical lawyers