Afghan hijackers

The Hammersmith Law Centre has made a near-30-year career of successfully challenging government and local government on behalf of local people. Now, the Hammersmith Law Centre is facing a 60% cut in the grant that it gets from Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

This isn't the first time that the law centre has found itself threatened with closure. This article continues interviews with people who are interested to know why the law centre is in the firing line again.

There are links to the first reports on the Hammersmith Law Centre and voluntary sector funding cuts issue at Hammersmith and Fulham at the end of this story.

Photo: John Fitzgerald and Sheona York

There are certainly days when founding Hammersmith Law Centre lawyer and Law Centres Federation Chair John Fitzpatrick wonders if the centre's famed habit of confronting political nobilities led to Hammersmith and Fulham council whacking £120,000 from the centre's grant this year.

Fitzgerald, who sits on the centre's management committee and teaches at the University of Kent, isn't particularly keen to gratify anybody's thundering paranoia: on the other hand, he feels that a number of the centre's recent cases may have lost it points with whoever it is out there who keeps tabs on prospective troublemakers.

Chief among these cases was the recent and much-publicised court case of the group of nine Afghan men who hijacked a plane in 2000, and held more than 150 crew and passengers hostage in an airport standoff that went on for some days. The men argued that they took this extreme action because they had no choice and wanted to escape the Taliban. They were jailed, but freed on appeal.