Maya Lester KC KC > Brick Court Chambers > London, England > Barrister Profile

Maya Lester KC KC

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Work Department

Brick Court Chambers

Position

Maya Lester KC is recommended as a leading silk by the legal directories in six practice areas: Administrative & Public Law, Competition & European Law, Civil Liberties & Human Rights, Public International Law and Sanctions.  She is ranked in the ‘Chambers 100 UK Bar’ list of the top 100 barristers, and in Who’s Who as one of the world’s leading competition and trade and customs lawyers. Her cases include Wightman (the ECJ case on the revocability of Brexit), acting for JP Morgan in the LIBOR investigation, and for the MOL Group in its European Arrest Warrant EU litigation & international arbitrations.  She is a member of the Bars of England & Ireland.

Maya has a particular expertise in the law relating to economic sanctions.  As the directories put it, she is “Queen of the Sanctions Bar without a doubt” and “owns the world of sanctions”. She founded and co-writes europeansanctions.com, the leading resource on sanctions & export control, with around 12,000 followers worldwide.  She represents and advises hundreds of companies and individuals before the European and English courts (including on the UK Sanctions Act, the EU Blocking Regulation, sanctions clauses and investigations) and has acted in most of the leading cases, including Youseff, Synesis, Kadi, VTB, Tay Za, Central Bank of Iran, NITC and IRISL.

Maya’s leading cases include Synesis v FCDO (the first Sanctions Act appeal), Kadi(II) v Council & Commission (the leading case on the relationship between UN Security Council resolution s & EU law), R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State (the Chagos Islands judicial reviews in the UK and ECHR), Enron v EWS (the first very follow-on competition damages trial in the UK, and several subsequent follow-on damages actions including National Grid), R v Goldshield (prosecuting cartels as conspiracy to defraud), Walker v Innospec (equality in civil partners’ pensions) the Shambo judicial review (on bovine TB), and the Rahmatullah litigation.  She has appeared in numerous judicial reviews of regulatory decisions (eg Cityhook, UniChem), competition appeals (including on LIBOR, Pay TV, horseracing, dairy, and construction recruitment), directors’ disqualification cases,  ICSID & UNCITRAL arbitrations and appears several times a year in the European Court of Justice.

Maya was a founder of the Human Rights Lawyers Association and undertakes regular pro bono and public interest work. There is a strong US and international element to her practice; she spent three years as a Visiting Scholar & Master of Studies in Law at Yale and Columbia Law Schools.  She is a regular speaker for the American Society for International Law, C5, RUSI, Chatham House, Justice, Public Law Project, Hart, ALBA, the ABA Antitrust Spring Meeting, BIICL, International Bar Association, Bar European Group and World ECR.