I have a horror of “daily routine” pieces by sanctimonious celebrities. Gwyneth Paltrow claiming to “wake about 6.30am” for “20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation”. Gregg Wallace telling us that, after years of “journaling, manifesting,” he starts his Saturdays at 5am, exercises, has a 10am breakfast at Harvester followed by lunch prepared by his wife, then squeezes in time with his child before an afternoon of gaming. Having sniggered along with everyone else, I now find myself being asked to write a diary. How honest is too honest? How can I skate the line between the inspirational (Mark Twain’s “the secret of getting ahead is getting started”) and Alan Partridge (“I woke with a start. At first I assumed I’d trumped myself awake again”)? In truth, my week has an exhausting combination of meetings in London, Dublin and New York, working on historic injustices (Hillsborough, Irish mother and baby homes) and pressing new issues (advising a rape victim who wants to speak out, and the Irish government on child protection issues); and frazzled attempts at parenting three teenagers.
My week begins with wonderful news: Egyptian-British blogger and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been pardoned by President Sisi after years of unlawful detention. I am in touch with the family in the tricky hours between the elation of the public announcement and the actual release, when no one is sure what will happen. Their messages are joyful, nervous, but also focused on others left behind. “I hope we can find some way to help Sebastien now that this is over,” Alaa’s cousin Omar tells me, his first thought for the son of Jimmy Lai, the British journalist wrongly imprisoned in Hong Kong.
On Friday I am in New York to meet my client Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For years she has been pursued through the courts for her journalism, facing a barrage of spurious lawsuits designed to silence her. But Maria’s first questions to me are about my imprisoned clients. Jimmy Lai. Mzia Amaglobeli in Georgia. José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala. “What can I do to help?” Maria asks.
For decades I have worked with the families of political prisoners: people trapped in a nightmare because their loved one is a journalist or writer or activist standing up to a brutal regime, or simply someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. It never ceases to amaze me how people who have been through such trauma decide to spend their time supporting others. Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post journalist imprisoned in Iran a decade ago now devotes his time to campaigning. Richard Ratcliffe and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe quietly support so many families going through the ordeal they know all too well. Vladimir Kara-Murza is a “dissident-in-residence” (surely the best job title going) in Georgetown University, working on securing freedom for those left behind in Russian prisons. They are all members of the club no one wants to be in. And once in it, they don’t leave: they do all they can for others. That’s far more inspiring to me than meditation and journaling.
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Writing for Prospect this month has been emotionally fraught, as a favourite contributor, and my friend, Conor Gearty, died suddenly on 11th September. Conor was someone I first heard about from afar and by reputation when I was a debating-obsessed student in Dublin in the 1990s. He was a legendarily brilliant speaker who won every debating competition in sight in the 1970s. When he and Donal O’Donnell (now the Irish chief justice) won the Observer Mace trophy twice in a row, the organisers considered changing the rules to stop them entering, and winning, yet again.
This week I revisited Conor’s writing, reflecting on his university debating days. He noted the pride we all took as student debaters in our ability to argue any side of an argument, however outlandish it might seem to be. “For years I regarded this articulate promiscuity as evidence of a vacuous core that lay at the heart of all of our performances, a flaunting of our skills over our beliefs,” he wrote. “Now I am not so sure. These days all our beliefs seem increasingly to exist in bubbles of determinedly unreflective certainty, with the art of persuasion mattering less than the solidarity secured by display of an untouchable point of view.” Debate breaks down this certainty, forcing you to enter the mind of the holder of an opposing point of view and even to advocate for it. “Try it for yourself”, Conor urged us. “‘That America needs Trump’; ‘That Brexit is the right approach for Britain’; ‘That Ireland benefits from a hard border’—push yourself into these foreign countries where the currency of feeling is different and the experiences that drive ideas are not your own. You’d be surprised what you find.”
Even Conor’s superlative human rights career came from pushing himself to engage with an opposing point of view. In 2002, he applied for a new post as director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, despite his then views—encapsulated in the first question he faced at interview: “Given your well-known objection to the whole idea of human rights, Professor Gearty, why have you applied for this post?” How lucky we are that he did.
