HIGH COURT judge Pushpinder Saini has been making serious interventions, through his judgments, to tackle the abuse of the legal system. The 56-year-old judge, who sits in the King’s Bench Division, came down heavily against the ‘gratuitously offensive’ comments targeted at a solicitor from London firm Leigh Day, who was representing naturalist Chris Packham in a defamation case against an online publication. Highlighting a comment made by a defendant, Dominic Wightman, editor of Country Squire Magazine, against solicitor Tessa Gregory, about finding a handwriting expert ‘this side of Basra’, Justice Saini wrote in his May 2023 judgment: “Why Basra? This was a gratuitously offensive reference to the legal representation by Tessa Gregory of Leigh Day of Iraqi civilians in wholly unrelated litigation.” Noting that Packham’s case has nothing to do with Iraq or other clients of Gregory, Saini complimented the solicitor for acting with “exemplary professionalism and moderation” in the firm’s responses to this and a number of “other pieces of offensive correspondence” by Wightman about the representation of Iraqi civilians.
“One of the great assets of the British legal system and its respect for the rule of law is that solicitors and barristers are not to be equated with their clients, current or former. [Wightman’s] approach showed an ignorance of this,” he added, while ruling in favour of Packham, and awarding the television presenter £90,000 in damages. In January this year, he sentenced an online stalker who ran a five-year campaign against a circuit judge, Simon Oliver, to eight years.
The provocation has been the dismissal of an appeal from Javed Sheikh, a hospital worker, against a decision to add him to barred lists. Noting that his sentencing remarks could not “capture the horrendous nature” of what Sheikh said in the blog about Judge Oliver and his family, or the nature of the personal threats they faced, Saini said Sheikh’s aim was to “encourage disgruntled litigants who had appeared before Judge Oliver to join your army of hate”. “Online stalkers like you have the ability to recruit an army of followers whose conduct massively expands the effect of your stalking. The multiplication effect of your stalking by online media meant in many respects your conduct was more serious than that of a conventional stalker,” he wrote. Handing out the jail term to Sheikh, the judge commented: “Our democratic society requires that judicial office holders be open to criticism of their judicial conduct and decisions. Your acts however went far beyond any legitimate exercise of the right to freedom of expression.” In May 2022, he called on legal regulators to institute summary processes to deal with vexatious litigants who use their procedures to continue a “proxy war” against lawyers, as he banned a former nurse, Alvida Harrold, who made “wholly inappropriate and unjustified allegations of wrongdoing” against lawyers from bringing proceedings for two years. Criticising the Bar Standards Board for taking almost a year to investigate a third complaint about the same lawyer, he said: “This case is a good example of the need for regulators of legal professionals to be astute in identifying litigants who abusively use regulatory process in order to pursue complaints about the outcome of legal proceedings, as opposed to any genuine claims of professional misconduct.
” Some of the prominent cases presided over by Saini in recent months include the legal challenge by sanctioned Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman who wanted funds to pay the upkeep of his Victorian mansion in north London, containing a 44 million-pound art collection. Fridman’s assets, subject to European and British sanctions, were frozen at the start of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. In a 31-page ruling in October 2023, Saini rejected his legal bid against Britain’s sanctions office, OFSI, which had been made on three different grounds, saying its decision was lawful. In the same month, he rejected the objections from Tottenham Hotspur Football Club to a £2 billion redevelopment scheme by construction firm Lendlease in north London.
Spurs argued that Haringey Council had failed to consider the heritage impact on North Tottenham’s conservation area and listed buildings while giving planning permission to the scheme, which includes six tall buildings and a new public park near to the club’s stadium. Saini observed that part of the club’s case was based on a “mischaracterisation of the heritage analysis” carried out by the council. “The planning assessment of public benefits is clear. There is a clear development plan… and the regenerative impacts of the scheme are of overwhelming significance in the planning balance,” he added. Saini also serves as presiding judge of the Western Circuit, responsible for the deployment of the judiciary and allocation of cases. 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. In 2009 Saini represented the Indian Premier League in its first prosecution of a cricketer for an anti-doping offence, leading to a one-year ban on Mohammed Asif, former Pakistan fast bowler, by the IPL Tribunal. 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, following an open competition run by the Judicial Appointments Commission. He has been at the forefront of outreach activities in seeking to encourage a more diverse range of persons to enter the legal profession, and mentored a substantial number of ethnic minority applicants during his time at the bar.
