IN January, Justice Pushpinder Saini was appointed as the presiding judge of the Western Circuit, responsible for the deployment of the judiciary and allocation of cases on the circuit.
The 55-year-old High Court judge, who sits in the King’s Bench Division, will have a three-year tenure period, till December 2026, with responsibility for general supervision of judges on the circuit.
Saini was appointed as High Court judge in October 2019, following an open competition run by the Judicial Appointments Commission.
He has since delivered a number of important judgments, which include the case related to the death of Harry Dunn, the teenager who was killed in a road crash outside the US military base RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, which caused diplomatic tension between the UK and US, after the suspect Anne Sacoolas, wife of a US official, claimed diplomatic immunity.
A division bench consisting Saini ruled in favour of Sacoolas, but she was later volunteered to be prosecuted.
Saini was also part of the bench that rejected India’s appeal to extradite Kuldeep Singh, a senior member of a banned Sikh organisation, in December 2021, upholding the magistrates’ court order turning down the extradition on human rights grounds.
During his practising career, Saini was recognised as one of the leading barristers in the fields of civil liberties and human rights, along with administrative and public law and media and entertainment law.
He has acted as counsel on some of the leading human rights cases in the domestic courts and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The Court of Appeal decision in Smith and others v Ministry of Defence, concerning territorial scope of the Human Rights Act 1998 as regards British service personnel was a case of particular interest among these. The case involved a series of claims brought by the families of troops killed while on duty in Iraq and a unanimous Supreme Court judgment held that the deceased soldiers were under the UK’s jurisdiction for the purposes of the Act at the time of their deaths.
He has acted for the UK government in Strasbourg and for the Cyprus government in a long-running inter-state litigation against Turkey. In 2009 Saini represented the Indian Premier League (IPL) in its first prosecution of a cricketer for an anti-doping offence, leading to a one-year ban on Mohammed Asif, a former Pakistan fast bowler, by the IPL Tribunal.
Saini is famous for representing celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, Simon Cowell and Queen guitarist Brian May and footballer Nicolas Anelka.
The son of Punjabi immigrants from Kenya, Saini was raised and educated in Southall, West London. He attended Dormers Wells Comprehensive School in Southall before undertaking his undergraduate and graduate studies at Corpus Christi College Oxford, where he obtained two First Class law degrees.
He was called to the Bar in 1991 (Gray’s Inn) and took silk in 2008. He was appointed a Deputy High Court Judge in 2017 and a High Court Judge in 2019.
He has been at the forefront of outreach activities in seeking to encourage a more diverse range of people to enter the legal profession, and mentored a substantial number of minority ethnic applicants during his time at the Bar.
