For 40 years, Michael Mansfield has been, for many, the face of human rights law. Now, he is hanging up his Old Bailey wig, but he says this is not the end

EARLY ONE morning in 1973, Michael Mansfield, then a young struggling barrister in London, drove his Triumph sports car to work in the Old Bailey during a rail strike, managing to find a parking place right outside the court when he arrived.

Gleefully accepting his good fortune, Mansfield locked up and galloped – as he says in his new autobiography, Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer – up the steps. Two hours later, the car in front, carrying an IRA bomb, exploded, blowing his own to smithereens. Two days later, Mansfield was asked to defend two of those arrested within hours, Dolours and Marian Price, both of whom eventually received life sentences after a 10-week trial held amidst some of the heaviest security yet seen in the UK.

Nearly 40 years on, Michael Mansfield has been associated with most of the major Irish cases that appeared before the British courts during the Troubles: the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward, the Bloody Sunday inquiry, and others.

Today, aged 67, though he could be taken for a decade younger, Mansfield is “two-thirds giving up. I don’t want to come and do stuff in the UK. I still have one or two things left to finish, but other than that I would love to go back to The Hague and join the new victims unit there.”

Clearly buoyed by the challenge ahead, Mansfield says the new organisation will prepare cases on behalf of genocide victims, and their families, separate from but parallel to the International Criminal Court prosecutors’ own work.

A thorn in the side of the British Establishment, the London-born and bred lawyer sees similarities and differences between the experiences of the Irish in the UK in the 1970s and the experience of young Muslims today.

The days of “fit-up” prosecutions, where police fabricated evidence, are behind us, Mansfield says thankfully. “But what is happening is that the Muslim community is getting targeted as if they are the repository of terrorism in the same way that the Irish were in the 1970s.

“The malaise that afflicted the Irish cases, where there were fit-ups, has moved on. The malaise now affects how the police decide who they are going to target. Plainly, they get it wrong. In the Jean Charles de Menezes’ case, they got the identity wrong.

“They steam in, all truncheons flying. That’s the problem: the fear is so great, it translates into stringent action, sometimes against the wrong people. It isn’t that people are getting wrongly convicted; it is that they are getting wrongly targeted.”

Uncomfortable about Big Brother surveillance, he accepts it as inevitable: “The big problem is that it isn’t joined up. One bit knows something that it doesn’t pass on to the next bit. The next bit, even if it gets it, doesn’t realise the significance of what it has.”

But information gathered must be regulated, particularly during a climate of fear about terrorist attacks, so as to prevent abuses by government, and those in darker corridors of power, who always see such times as opportunities to keep “tabs on undesirables”.

“It’s not an active conspiracy, in that sense. It is an unspoken understanding that if you are in government you automatically need to curtail this, to curtail that and accumulate information. It isn’t just Labour, or the Tories.

“It is an attribute of government. The two go hand-in-hand. It isn’t an active conspiracy of a small cabal of people sitting around the table saying, ‘We’re going to take over the world.’ I don’t think it is that at all.

“It is that the power class understand that this is what we have to do to stay in power.”

Mansfield does not think much of politicians and earnestly hopes for a major upheaval in next year’s British election.

Infuriated as they have been by the MPs’ expenses’ scandal, Mansfield believes British voters have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reform politics: one that should not simply come down to a choice between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

“I think people in the next election should think twice about voting for either of the main parties and they should all get a big shake-up. They should all have to struggle to get power. Parliaments should be cut from four to two years.

“MPs should be mandated by their electorates: if they say that they are not going to do X and then they do X, I am sorry then you have got to resign, stand for re-election, or whatever, or reseal your contract.

“The problem has been that most of the British public are disaffected. They think that voting doesn’t change anything, because it doesn’t. The parties go on doing exactly what they want to do,” he says. The solution does not lie in a Brown/Cameron swop: “I would not vote him in either. He is better than some Tories by a long, long way, but one remembers his past. He is a bit of an opportunist, as Tony Blair was.”

Mansfield remains an optimist, comparing favourably his youngest son Freddy’s work this summer with Medical Aid for Palestine with his own lack of involvement with CND, “which was seen as terribly subversive,” in the 1960s.

The past is not a rosy, far-off land: “It was a very secret state. If you think about the lies that were told by the Eden government over Suez, and Nasser: that was pretty horrific. I think there was probably a lack of freedom.

“But we were made to believe that we had a greater freedom then. I am not sure that we did. I think we are more aware now of how much less freedom we have than we ought to have. That’s the difference.

“We are not in a worse situation than when I started,” Mansfield concludes. “We are in a better situation. The public has moved on. We have got changes brought about by the public, but it is the politicians who are lagging behind.”