Launch of Sharia Watch UK LSS Secretary Charlie Klendjian House of Lords, Thursday 24 th April 2014

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Launch of Sharia Watch UK LSS Secretary Charlie Klendjian House of Lords, Thursday 24 th April 2014 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much to Baroness Cox and Anne Marie Waters

1 Launch of Sharia Watch UK LSS Secretary Charlie Klendjian House of Lords, Thursday 24 th April 2014 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you very much to Baroness Cox and Anne Marie Waters for kindly inviting me to speak in such an awe inspiring building, to such a distinguished audience, on such a depressing subject. My name is Charlie Klendjian. I am a commercial solicitor and the Secretary of the Lawyers Secular Society. The LSS is a group of legal professionals and law students, religious and nonreligious, who make no apology for being fiercely committed to secularism and to ensuring equality before the law for people of all faiths and none. Today, however, I am not here to speak generally about religion, or secularism, much though the LSS has to say on these subjects. No, today I am here to speak about sharia law and only sharia law. Political Islam, a crucial plank of which is sharia law, presents what we can calmly describe as a unique set of challenges for the 21 st century. Sharia law is perhaps the most serious political, legal, moral and social issue we face and when I say we I do not mean lawyers, or secularists, but sadly humanity itself. I am very pleased that this group has been set up, and with the participation of parliamentarians, because a political response is sorely needed to what is essentially a political threat, and a very grave one, to our way of life. To the extent there s any consensus on sharia law amongst our politicians at the present time it s a consensus, at best, of collective head burying in sand and at worst, a consensus of positively encouraging and facilitating sharia law; of giving it the oxygen it craves. This worrying trend must be reversed, and at some tempo, and I hope today might be the beginning of that process. Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 1 / 8

2 I want to focus today on the disturbing practice note on sharia law that was issued just over a month ago now by the representative body for my profession in England and Wales, the Law Society. The Law Society s practice notes which are guidance to solicitors are not binding, and they do not have the force of law, but they do represent best practice for solicitors on certain legal areas. They are significant wording, emanating from a significant body within a significant institution of any democracy: its legal system. I would now like to try and convey to you the gravity, and also the absurdity, of the unenviable predicament we find ourselves in, by briefly outlining the Law Society s puzzled approach to what is today such an elastic principle that it has snapped and ceased to have any substantive meaning at all. That s right, I m talking about equality and diversity, an ideal that once had noble intentions and noble achievements but which now, increasingly, musters in us the level of enthusiasm we tend to reserve for health and safety, or data protection. On 10 March 2014, on the front page of the Law Society Gazette, the Law Society s former president and current chair of its equality and diversity committee Lucy Scott Moncrief called attention to the woeful underuse of women s talent in the legal profession. Just seventy two hours later, on 13 March 2014, the Law Society issued its practice note on Sharia succession rules. That guidance contained the following wording, which I m sure by now will be very familiar to many of you: The male heirs in most cases receive double the amount inherited by a female heir of the same class. Non Muslims may not inherit at all... And: illegitimate and adopted children are not Sharia heirs. As I mentioned in a letter that was published in the Gazette, sharia law is not exactly girl power and interfaith cohesion, is it? Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 2 / 8

3 The president of the Law Society has justified this practice note on the grounds that we live in a diverse, multi faith, multi cultural society. Ladies and gentlemen, blink and you will have missed it: in the space of just seventy two hours equality and diversity has undergone a radical branding makeover and become inequality and division. The president also said: The Law Society responded to requests from its members on sharia law. It s fair to say there has been some inaccurate reporting of the effect of the Law Society s guidance, whether that was due to intentionally bullish journalism and headline writing, or just sloppiness. There has been talk, for example, of sharia law now being enshrined in English law. This is legally inaccurate. The LSS, I m pleased to say, has not slipped on these legal banana skins. The LSS has been very clear from the outset that the law has not changed. On this, at least, we agree with the Law Society. So, why all the fuss? Well the first problem, before we even venture into any discussion of discrimination, is that the Law Society is giving its members guidance on sharia law. It is giving guidance on theology. This is not an appropriate thing for the Law Society to be doing. The Law Society has delved into territory that is beyond its remit because in the jurisdiction of England and Wales sharia law only has the status of theology, and nothing more than theology. We must remind ourselves of this. However, by issuing a practice note on sharia law the Law Society has now given this theology the credibility and respectability of a legal discipline within our legal system, as if it belonged in the same family of other legal disciplines such as commercial property, mergers and acquisitions, consumer law, residential conveyancing, litigation, or competition law. Sharia law does not deserve the credibility and respectability of a legal discipline, and my professional body has no right to give it that credibility and respectability. And the second problem, as we have seen from the guidance wording I have just quoted, is that sharia law is fundamentally discriminatory as far as English law is concerned. It is fundamentally discriminatory to women, it is fundamentally discriminatory to non Muslims, Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 3 / 8

4 it is fundamentally discriminatory to illegitimate children (and how nice to see that phrase make a long awaited comeback, incidentally), and it is fundamentally discriminatory to adopted children and children who are considered to be of a different faith. Let s take a moment to record a very simple and fact based observation here: sharia law is somewhat different to English law. Subject to noble statutory protections which safeguard the rights of a deceased s dependants, under English law a testator can generally be as mean spirited and politically incorrect as he or she wants. There is no prohibition on discrimination in a will, and so if a testator wants to incorporate into a will ancient religious rules which specifically deem men more worthy than women, and Muslims more worthy than non Muslims, and natural children more worthy than adopted children, then he or she is at liberty to do so. We call this testamentary freedom, and it is an established and uncontroversial feature of our legal system. The LSS is not challenging testamentary freedom. Testators had testamentary freedom before this practice note and they continue to have that freedom now. Nothing has changed there. Well I say nothing has changed but actually it has. The Law Society, despite its protestations to the contrary, has legitimised, normalised, sanitised and endorsed the distribution of an estate in accordance with the fundamentally discriminatory provisions of sharia law. Effectively it has told its members: If you want to discriminate, this is how you go about it. Just follow these instructions. The Law Society would not and it should not issue guidance on how to incorporate into a will anti Semitic, homophobic, racist, or anti Muslim provisions, even though such provisions would fall comfortably into the realms of the testamentary freedom our legal system allows, and even if members specifically made requests for such guidance. Any competent English lawyer instructed by a client to achieve those objectives in a will is perfectly capable of giving effect to those wishes, and as a profession, as members of the public, we would consider it strange, disturbing and inappropriate in the extreme for the Law Society to specifically tell solicitors how to do that. And so it s legitimate for us to ask at this point: Why on earth is the Law Society giving guidance on how to incorporate other discriminatory provisions? We re also entitled to ask: Just why are the rules of engagement for Islam so overwhelmingly so painfully transparently different? Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 4 / 8

5 By legitimising, normalising, sanitising and endorsing the distribution of an estate in accordance with the fundamentally discriminatory provisions of sharia law, the Law Society has by extension legitimised, normalised, sanitised and endorsed sharia law more generally. Given sharia law s failure, on a truly magnificent scale, to uphold any acceptable standard of human rights, this ringing endorsement of sharia law by the Law Society is deeply alarming. As you can imagine, the Law Society s decision to issue this guidance is a matter of considerable concern for the LSS, because we say that a secular legal system is priceless, and that it is essential to our way of life. I will be taking part in a protest on behalf of the LSS against the Law Society s decision to issue their sharia guidance, this Monday 28 th April, outside the Law Society s offices at Chancery Lane at 5pm. The details are on our website. If you can, please do come along or help us to publicise it, and I would be very grateful especially to any journalists here who might be able to cover it in some way. The LSS was involved in the successful protest at the end of last year against the guidance issued by Universities UK, which endorsed gender segregation in British universities for genuinely held religious beliefs. This success was thanks, in large part, to the condemnation of UUK s guidance by the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, and the Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna that was triggered by our protest. Surprisingly, but encouragingly, this bipartisan condemnation was for once clear and unequivocal, with none of the awkward fence sitting and bet hedging we have sadly become so accustomed to expect from our politicians on questions of Islam. So there does seem to be some political appetite, and willingness, for progress here. We need to get the scandal of the Law Society s guidance on the desk of senior politicians, like we did with Universities UK. The Law Society has taken a typically lawyerly approach to the criticism it has faced, by repeatedly saying, correctly, that the law hasn t changed, and in fact sneeringly calling its critics ill informed. But the Law Society misses the point, for this reason. There is no law in this jurisdiction saying we are not allowed to depict Mohammed, but as we all know newspapers and TV stations don t generally do it. It s not, how shall we say, the done thing. Similarly, there is no law which magically suspends the legal rights of women the moment they step foot into a sharia council, but we know sharia councils are often legal black holes. In the same way, just because the Law Society s guidance has not changed the Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 5 / 8

6 law, it does not follow that we should not be concerned about it. We should be very concerned about it. The Law Society has focused merely on what the law is and it has completely failed to see the bigger picture. This is a skill at which technocratic, bureaucratic, dark room lawyers often excel. Any first year student of law will happily recite to you the phrase: Justice mustn t just be done, it must be seen to be done. By that same token, I say: English law mustn t just have primacy over sharia law, it must be seen to have primacy over sharia law. The Law Society s most unwelcome and unhelpful contribution to this epic debate of our age has profoundly disrupted the perception of English law s primacy. The Law Society s guidance has taken the legal profession towards a tipping point. We can now tip one of two ways. Either we tip towards formally allowing sharia law into our legal system, or we tip towards shining a bright light on sharia law s unwelcome advances and we start to reverse its inroads. I very much hope it s the latter. I will even go so far as to say that the Law Society has been constitutionally reckless with our legal system. As one of the key actors and gatekeepers of our legal system it has done its very best to undermine that legal system. It has received a knock on the door from sharia law and instead of saying No thank you, it has welcomed it in with the endearing enthusiasm of a playful lapdog and given it a shiny Law Society stamp of approval. And although sharia law is still not formally a part of our legal system, we might ask ourselves the following question: In issuing this practice note, has the Law Society made it more likely or less likely that sharia law will one day be formally incorporated into our legal system? I suggest the Law Society has made it more likely. Through the work of Baroness Cox and Anne Marie Waters, and many other fine individuals, we have seen the mayhem that sharia law is already creating in our jurisdiction and remember, this is when it has the status of theology. We know that women and children routinely have their fundamental legal rights violated in sharia councils, be it because of duress, because of an inequality of bargaining power, or because of a simple ignorance of their rights under English law. And so we can ask another question: If this is the mayhem created when sharia law has the status of theology, dare we imagine what kind of mayhem it might create as law? Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 6 / 8

7 Although it is the position that a sharia will that is incompatible with English law can be challenged under English law, how likely do we think such a challenge would be, in all honesty? Given all we know about the operation of sharia councils, for example, and how they routinely and shamefully prevent the normal exercise and enforcement of fundamental legal rights, it s reasonable to assume that aggrieved beneficiaries under a sharia will might feel enormous pressure not to challenge its legal validity. So when we say a sharia will must comply with English law we must also add the killer footnote: but it doesn t really matter if it doesn t comply. Make no mistake, if sharia law ever were to formally become part of our legal system it would not exit that legal system quietly. Indeed, this country might even require some form of civil disorder or something akin to a violent revolution to remove sharia law from our legal system. Once sharia law is formally within our legal system there will follow a process of contagion to other areas of our legal system. This is as inevitable as day following night. It will spread to the criminal law. And to those who dismiss these fears as pie in the sky, tabloid scare mongering, or ill informed, and who say, Charlie, this could never happen, you re just being silly now, I say this: I didn t think the Law Society would issue Sharia guidance on how to discriminate against women and non Muslims. Did you? And now for some good news. As I said at the beginning, I am very pleased this group has been launched. It represents a resistance. In fact the solution to this problem is not a difficult one. It is a simple one, and it is this. It is for everyone especially our politicians, public figures and the media to discuss Islam in the most candid and honest manner possible, and to faithfully observe, record and comment on the increasingly non benign influence Islam is having on our way of life. We have no tyrannical government to overthrow, no draconian laws to remove from our statute books, and no revolutionary new laws to pass though Baroness Cox s arbitration and mediation bill would be a very welcome statutory addition. We simply need to enforce existing laws, and exercise existing rights most crucially free speech and we must apply the same quality of debate, scrutiny, scepticism and indeed ridicule to Islam as we would to any other religion and to any other subject that features in our public discourse, let alone one that features so heavily. Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 7 / 8

8 So the solution is a simple one in technical terms, but the willingness to apply that solution must be much, much more forthcoming. Because really, to finish, we have a very simple choice before us. We can either fight this battle now, with our words, or we can leave it to the generation that follows to fight it with their blood. They will not thank us for deferring this task to them, and history will be rather unkind to us. Thank you once again to Baroness Cox and Anne Marie for inviting me to speak, and I look forward to contributing further to this exciting venture in any way I possibly can. Thank you very much. Website: lawyerssecularsociety.wordpress.com lawsecsoc@yahoo.co.uk Lawyers Secular Society. Justice without privilege. 8 / 8

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