British Movement Lawyer Exposes Being Targeted By Senior Politicians and Cointel Police

When repressive governments around the world attack their own people and liberal democracies fight back, some of the first responders are movement lawyers. Unlike cowardly law firms that capitulate in advance, as we have seen here in the United States, movement lawyers work hand-in-hand with activists not merely challenging what the government is doing but putting the government itself on trial.

The roots of movement lawyering in the United States can be traced back to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, where lawyers challenged laws that upheld segregation and other forms of discrimination. These lawyers used the legal system not just as a passive tool but as an active agent of change. They helped litigate landmark cases that desegregated schools, secured voting rights, dismantled discriminatory laws, challenged draft laws and questioned the legality of the Vietnam War.

The founders of this program Law and Disorder, Michael Ratner, Michael Smith, Jim Lafferty, and Heidi Boghosian are all prominent movement lawyers.

But movement lawyers are not confined to the United States.

Guest- Fahad Ansari, is a senior civil liberties solicitor based in London. As a movement lawyer, he developed a niche in representing individuals and communities affected by counter-terrorism legislation, state surveillance, and discriminatory policing. His career has been defined by taking on some of Britains most sensitive cases including representing those stripped of their citizenship on grounds of national security and representing Hamas in its 2025 application to be removed from the British governments list of proscribed terrorist organizations.

The Hamas case resulted in Ansari being smeared by senior politicians and targeted by British counter-terrorism police and the government agency that regulates the practice of law in the UK.

On August 6, 2025, Ansari was stopped by officers at the port of Holyhead as he returned from a family holiday in Ireland with his wife and four children. Ansari said the bulk of the questioning was about Palestine Action, a group recently proscribed under the Terrorism Act. He was also asked about Hamas but refused to answer, citing client confidentiality. Ansari said he was held by police for three hours, fingerprinted, photographed and swabbed for DNA and told to remove his face ID and pin from his phone or face arrest. The following day, the contents of his phone were copied by the police.

Ansari said that In the decade that I have been involved in national security cases, I have never heard of lawyers in England being targeted to this extent because of their clients. Some have complained that representing Hamas brings the profession into disrepute. Yet, what really undermines the integrity of the profession is when unpopular clients are unable to secure legal representation because of fear of public opprobrium and state intimidation.

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Michigan Movement Lawyer Mark Fancher

As we celebrate Black History Month, conversations often drift toward a comfortable, sanitized narrative of progress. But our guest today, Mark Fancher, has spent his career in the uncomfortable spaces where the struggle for racial justice remains ongoing, contested, and" for far too many communities"urgent.

Mark recently retired as Senior Staff Attorney with the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. But his commitment to justice did not begin there. A longtime leader in the National Conference of Black Lawyers and an active member of the National Lawyers Guild, he has devoted decades to challenging the systems that produce inequality"not merely documenting them.

In Michigan, those systems are stark, and those injustices are often enforced by the badge. Black residents comprise roughly 14 percent of the states population, yet account for nearly half of those incarcerated. That disparity is not incidental. It reflects policies, practices, and policing strategies entrenched over generations. Mark has litigated the human consequences behind those numbers"from confronting a culture of brutality in the City of Taylor, which he described as functioning like an occupying army, to defending Black officers such as Johnny Strickland, who faced retaliation within their own departments for speaking out.

Mark is no stranger to the friction that truth-telling provokes. More than a decade ago, at a Unity Breakfast in Muskegon, his remarks about white privilege and police misconduct prompted audience members to walk out. He was labeled divisive. But as Mark reminded them then"and reminds us now"Dr. King did not preach comfort. He taught the oppressed to confront injustice without fear and without retreat.