Doughty Street

Doughty Street is a broad tree lined street in the Holborn district of the London Borough of Camden. The southern part is a continuation of the short John Street, which comes off Theobalds Road. The northern part crosses Guilford Street and ends at Mecklenburgh Square.

History

The street contains mainly grade II listed Georgian houses built between 1790 and the 1840s. Many of the houses have been converted into offices and are popular with companies in the legal profession and the media. In the last few years, many of these have been converted back to family homes.

In the nineteenth century, it was an exclusive residential street and had gates at either end to restrict entry and these were manned by porters.

"It was a broad, airy, wholesome street - none of your common thoroughfares, to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-shaking Pickford's vans; but a self-included property, with a gate at each end, and a lodge with a porter in a gold-laced hat and the Doughty arms on the buttons of his mulberry coat, to prevent any one, except with a mission to one of the houses, from, intruding on the exclusive territory."

Doughty Street Chambers

Doughty Street Chambers is a British set of barristers' chambers situated in Bristol, Manchester and London's Doughty Street, undertaking criminal justice, public law, immigration, employment, human rights and civil liberties work.

Doughty Street Chambers was set up in 1990 by thirty barristers, aiming to break the mould of traditional chambers by moving out of the Inns of Court. The chambers are now over four times the size with over 120 members, including 29 Queen's Counsels. Geoffrey Robertson is the founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers along with Edward Fitzgerald. Other notable members include Amal Clooney, Louis Blom-Cooper, Geraldine Van Bueren, Sadakat Kadri, Helena Kennedy, Ben Silverstone and Keir Starmer.

In 2007 Bruce Hyman, a trainee barrister with Doughty Street Chambers who had not yet been granted membership, became the first British barrister in 800 years to be convicted of perverting the course of justice.

References

Amal Clooney

Amal Clooney (née Alamuddin, Arabic: أمل علم الدين‎; born 3 February 1978) is a London-based British-Lebanese lawyer, activist, and author. She is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, specializing in international law and human rights. Her clients include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in his fight against extradition. She has also represented the former prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, and Canadian-Egyptian journalist Mohamed Fahmy.

Background

Early life and family

Amal was born in Beirut, Lebanon. During the 1980s, when the Lebanese Civil War was in full scale, the Alamuddin family left Lebanon for England and settled in Gerrards Cross. She was two years old at the time. Her father, Ramzi Alamuddin, who received his MBA degree at the American University of Beirut and was the owner of COMET travel agency, returned to Lebanon in 1991. He originally hails from a prominent Lebanese Druze family from the town of Baakline, a village in the Chouf district where many Lebanese Druze live. Her mother, Bariaa Alamuddin (née Miknass), is a foreign editor of the Pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat and a founder of the public relations company International Communication Experts, which is part of a larger company that specializes in celebrity guest bookings, publicity photography, and event promotion. Bariaa is a Sunni Muslim from Tripoli, Lebanon, where a significant community of Lebanese Sunni Muslims live.

Human rights

Human rights are moral principles or norms, that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being," and which are "inherent in all human beings" regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances; for example, human rights may include freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution.