Dr Satvinder Singh Juss Ph.D (Cantab) FRSA, is a Professor of
Law at King's College London UK, a Barrister-at-Law practising
from 3 Hare Court, Temple, London, EC4Y 7DR, and a Deputy
Judge of the Upper Tribunal (IAC) in London and Birmingham.
He is a former Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Law School,
Boston, USA, and began his working career as a Fellow of
Emmanuel College Cambridge. He has been a Migration
Commissioner at the Royal Society of Arts and contributed to the
report in November 2005 on 'Migration: A Welcome Opportunity',
and more recently worked with the Centre for Social Justice in
their work on Human Trafficking, which led to anti-trafficking
legislation being passed in 2015. As he Barrister, he has acted for
government of Belize, Bermuda and Trinidad (and was the first
non-QC to have been admitted at the Trinidad Bar) undertaking
commercial litigation. He has published widely on the subjects of
human rights, constitutional law, and international refugee law.
Professor Juss is fluent in Punjabi and Urdu and Swahili.
Professor Satvinder S. Juss was born and raised in colonial East
Africa on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Moshi, Tanganyika
(now Tanzania) in 1958. Though idyllic and multicultural and
multi-ethnic in its unspoilt setting, this was also the time of the
‘Mau Mau’ independence movement in the region. Discrimination
was rife. “I remember the European villas and bungalows on the
mountain, the Indian houses lower down where we lived, and the shanty
African villages right at the bottom” he says, “all of which reinforced the
social order of each community being confined to its own area in the
racial hierarchy.” After independence, in 1961 the period of
decolonization let to an exodus of former British Subjects of nonAfrican extraction and the British Government passed the
Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 to stem the flow to the UK.
Not all were readily welcomed.
As the emigration to the former ‘mother country’ continued, the
second Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 was hurriedly
passed through Parliament in three days to prevent the entry of
erstwhile British Subjects of Asian extraction. In Nairobi, Kampala
and Dar-es-Salaam, Asian families clamoured to secure an airline
ticket to London before the new legislation restricted their entry.
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In the meantime, the Bill hurtled through Parliament, “in an
atmosphere of emergency and with a willingness to surrender
liberal and humanitarian decencies generally associated only with
the gravest national crisis” ( J.M. Evans, Immigration Law, 1983, p.
18), as the House of Lords sat all night to ensure the Act’s speedy
passage. Professor Juss recalls his father returning home from
work in the evening and deciding overnight to take a chartered
flight from Dar-es-Salaam to London. He just managing by a
whisker to get through in time before the Act became law.
His father found work in the heart of the then industrial West
Midlands, in Wolverhampton, the first town in Great Britain to be
affected by mass immigration. By the time, his family arrived
from Tanzania to join him in June of that year, Enoch Powell, the
Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton, had
succeeded in making immigration and race subjects of high
national political debate in the UK, with his toxic ‘Rivers of Blood’
speech of 20th April 1968. Marches, news reports, and TV
documentaries followed across the country in the febrile
atmosphere of the times. The Observer newspaper ran a feature
under the headline, ‘Town That Has Lost Its Reason’ and on 5th
March 1969 the Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations
& Immigration met in the town (see, Sathnam Sanghera, ‘The Boy
with the Topnot’, 2009, p.150).
By the time Professor Juss completed his studies in Law at
Cambridge University in 1985 Britain was an altogether different
place, but his early exposure to being a refugee and an immigrant
coming from a country undergoing cultural, religious and ethnic
tensions, shepherded him into a career in Human Rights,
Comparative Constitutional Law, Immigration & Refugee Law,
and Post-Colonial Studies. He became the first Sikh Law Fellow in
Cambridge at Emmanuel College in 1985 and took a Human
Rights Fellowship at Harvard Law School in 1996, whilst a
Harkness Fellow (a ‘reverse-Rhodes’ Scholarship) in the USA.
Following a short teaching stint at Indiana UniversityBloomington, he returned to the UK to take a post at Kings College
London, now the leading law school in the country. He became
the first tenured Sikh law Professor in the United Kingdom and is
amongst only a handful of Indian law professors teaching at an
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established research-led UK university. Professor Juss is proud of
his Sikh roots: “I believe it is important to remember where one comes
from” he mentions, “because only then can one sensibly decide where
one is going.” He has written on Sikh issues, most notably, ‘Sikh
Cremations & Re-Imagining the Clash of Cultures’ in the Human
Rights Quarterly (2013), ‘Kirpans, Law, Religious Symbols in Schools’
in the Journal of Church and State (2012), and ‘The Secular Tradition
in Sikhism’ in the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion (2010). He
is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Sikh Formations:
Religion, Culture, Theory.
Professor Juss sees law as an agent for positive change in society.
He seeks to incorporate the role of scholar, practitioner, and
activist in all the various fields of his expertise. As a practitioner,
he is Barrister and is on Panel ‘A’ of Advocates for the Equality &
Human Rights Commission for England and Wales. He is also on the
Panel ‘A’ for Advocates and for the Government of Wales. He was
Counsel in Shergill v. Khaira [2014] UKSC 33 and appeared in the
EctHR Grand Chamber hearing of the ‘burqa-ban case’ of S.A.S v.
France (App. No: 43835/11) in 2014. Over the years, he has
undertaken extensive Extensive high-profile pro bono advocacy, for
the Sheffield Asian Community Action Group, and for the Sikh Council
Hampshire (see Baradaran [2014] EWCA Civ. 854). His pro bono
cases include, Quilla & Bibi v. SSHD [2011] UKSC 45; [on the right
to marry] and Ghai v. Newcastle City Council [2010] EWCA Civ 59 [
the right to religious freedom.]; ZT (Kosovo) v. Secretary of State for
the Home Department [2009] UKHL [on certification of a ‘fresh
claim’ in asylum matters, and the proper place of ‘Wednesbury
unreasonableness’ ] and Secretary of State for the Home Department v.
Baiai [2008] UKHL 53 [a high profile religious discrimination case,
regarding Art. 12 (the ‘right to marry’) and Art. 14 (the ‘right not to
be discriminated against’) of the ECHR.
As a scholar, Professor Juss has written Immigration, Nationality &
Citizenship (1993); Discretion & Deviation in the Administration of
Immigration Control (1998); and International Migration & Global
Justice (2007). With respect to this book, Dr Vincent Chetail, a
consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
has said, ‘"Dr Satvinder Singh Juss's monograph is without doubt the
most refreshing and innovative of the recent literature on migration. ...’
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(see, Refugee Survey Quarterly ,Oxford University Press, 2008
27(3):183-185). Prof Werner Menski has said, “Known for forceful
arguments and incisive analysis, Juss has become a major academic
contributor to the literature on immigration and asylum…” (King's
College Law Journal , vol.19, Issue 2, 2008 at p. 429-437). But
Professor Juss has also written a book on Property law, ‘Judicial
Discretion and The Right to Property .
He has written in the majority of high profile British legal journals
from the Modern Law Review to the Cambridge Law Review and the
Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. His articles include, ‘The Decline and
Decay of European Refugee Policies’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies
(2005); ‘Medical Treatment-Pragmatism and the Search for Principle’
(with Professor Nigel Lowe), Modern Law Review (1993),
‘Pritchard v. Cobden [1987]2WLR : An unusual claim in the Court of
Appeal’ Cambridge Law Journal (1986) , ‘Judicial Review and the
Duty to Give Adequate Reasons’ Cambridge Law Journal (1986) ,
‘Declaration of Trust and Severance of Joint Tenancy-the End of the
Story?’ Cambridge Law Journal (1986) , ‘Towards a Morally
Legitimate Reform of Refugee Law : The Uses of Cultural Jurisprudence,
Harvard Human Rights Journal, (1998); ‘Constitutionalising Rights
Without a Constitution: The British Experience under Article 6 of the
Human Rights Act 1998’ Statute Law Review (2006) ‘Rule-making
and the Immigration Rules-A Retreat from Law?’ Statute Law Review
(1992); ‘Suspects’ Rights and PACE: Can the Courts do the Balancing
Trick?” Statute Law Review (1994) ; ‘The Meaning of ‘Error’ in
Appellate Review in Judicial Review, (2004) ‘Kokkinakis and Freedom
of Conscience Rights in Europe’, Journal of Civil Liberties , (1996) .
His more recent articles include ‘The post-Colonial Refugee, Dublin
II, and the End of Non-Refoulement’ International Journal on
Minority & Group Rights (2013) ; ‘Terrorism and the Exclusion of
Refugee Status’, Journal of Conflict & Security Law (2012) ;
‘Complicity, Exclusion, and the ‘Unworthy’ in Refugee Law’, Refugee
Survey Quarterly (2012) and ‘Refugee Law and the Protection of
Children fleeing Conflict and Violence in Afghanistan”, Journal of
Conflict and Security Law (2013).
Professor Juss’ most recent books include Contemporary Issues in
Refugee Law (with a Foreword by Lord Phillips) and the Ashgate
Research Companion on Migration Law, Theory & Policy (with a
Foreword by Volker Turk, the Director of the Division of
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International Protection of the Office of the UNHCR) both
published in 2013. He has just completed a jointly authored book,
‘Toward a Refugee Oriented Reform of Refugee Law’ (with Prof. Laura
Westra, and Prof. Tuillo Scovazzi) by Ashgate (2015).
Juss has just published three articles: The Notion of Complicity in
UK Refugee Law in the Journal of International Criminal Justice
(2015); The Sexualisation of Refugee Law in The International Journal
of Group Rights (2015) and ‘Burqa-Bashing & the Charlie Hebdo
Murders’ (2015). He has recently also contributed to the London
Review of Books.
His current work in progress includes three edited books:
Landmark Cases in Public Law (with Prof. Maurice Sunkim); Human
Rights & the War on Terror (with Prof. Clive Walker) ; and India &
Human Rights.
As an activist, Professor Juss was a member of the Centre for
Social Justice’s Working Group on Modern Slavery, which carried
out an 18-month investigation, leading to the Report last year of
“It Happens Here” ; see
http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%
20reports/CSJ_Slavery_Full_Report_WEB(5).pdf . As a result of
this anti-trafficking legislation was passed in the UK in 2015. He
gave a Speech in September 2012 at the India Universal Periodic
Review (UPR) at the United Nations; a Speech in November 2012,
at EASO Conference on Afghanistan in Malta; and Keynote Speech
at the UN Office in Brussels for the International Council for Human
Rights for their Human Rights Day Session in December 2012; He
presented Papers at the Cape Town Commonwealth Law Conference
in April 2013, was on a panel chaired by Lord Lester on
“Monitoring and Enforcement of Human Rights in the Domestic
Context,” .
Juss gave the Alice Tay Lecture in Sept. 2013 at the Australian
National University in Canberra, where he explained how in
adulthood when many years after leaving Tanzania as a child, he
had the opportunity to visit that country again, he was gratified to
see how in the years that followed independence, the African
residents of the town had moved into houses right at the top of the
mountain – exactly where they deserved to be. In October 2014 he
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was invited again to Canberra to give the Keynote Speech on
“Challenges to Sovereignty” at the ANU. Also in 2014, he took part
in the Advanced International Refugee Law Professional Development
Seminar on October 20th-21st 2014 (in Hotel El Mouradi,
Gammarth, Tunis, Tunisia) as representative of the UNHCR, to
provide expert commentary on the way in which States were
complying with their obligations to exclude refugees, under
Article 1F of the Refugee Convention 1951 for crimes against
humanity, only on properly justifiably grounds of personal
culpability, and not their general association with disfavoured
organisations (see:
http://www.iarlj.org/general/images/stories/docs/Tunis/Adva
ncedLevelProgramme.pdf ).
Professor Juss is a Fellow of the International Academy of Freedom of
Religion & Belief (USA), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in
London, and a Council member of the Indian Institute of Arbitration.
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