Doughty Street Chambers

Mark specialises in media and communications law and in public, human rights, and immigration law. He has acted in numerous leading cases in these areas spanning the last three decades, frequently on groundbreaking issues. His clients have ranged from very senior politicians to 69 of the survivors and bereaved in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.

Leading defamation cases have included a Court of Appeal judgment in which he defended the former Leader of the Opposition for answers given on BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show. As Standing Counsel for the Labour Party, Mark led its defence in the most high-profile defamation litigation in which it has been involved.

He has won extremely large damages against broadcasters, public figures, and most national newspapers in libel, privacy, harassment and data protection claims for claimants including politicians, journalists, actors, activists, NGOs, a TV station, a trade union and a former Guantanamo detainee.

He also acts for defendants including non-traditional newspapers, online news outlets and bloggers, trade unions, politicians, activists, political parties, and others who face defamation claims for what they have published online, in print, and on mainstream media, often on issues of high public importance.

He litigates cutting-edge issues and advises prominent organisations on data protection and privacy rights.

Mark’s public law and standards work includes landmark free speech/Article 10 and privacy/Article 8 judicial reviews and appeals. These include leading freedom of expression authorities from media regulation to public standards codes governing elected representatives.

He also advises and acts in media regulation complaints and proceedings, and for participants in high-profile inquiries by major broadcasters. He acts in reporting restrictions disputes, often raising major human rights issues.

He has extensive experience of acting and advising on claims in the midst of a media storm and against a backdrop of national controversy. He is accustomed to dealing with urgent instructions, working in multi-disciplinary teams, and can draw on his experience of running strategic litigation in the context of public campaigns and broader communications strategies. He is experienced in advising on and acting in successful mediations, including in the highest profile cases.

Mark’s public, human rights, and immigration work frequently raises cutting-edge issues, such as the relationship between judicial review on common law and the Human Rights Act grounds, and the duty of candour and disclosure in the Administrative Court. His public law clients range from detained asylum seekers to corporate bodies.

He has developed and acted in test case litigation in the UK (e.g. winning the right to settle in the UK for thousands of Gurkha veterans) and in Europe. He works on test cases in tandem with public campaigns (including the award-winning Gurkha Justice Campaign). He has acted for national and international NGOs in public interest interventions at the highest level. He also deals with interventions in his own cases (including from Amnesty International, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, UNHCR and numerous EU member states).

Mark has been instructed to advise, at the highest levels both nationally and internationally, on matters of the utmost political and constitutional importance, such as the right to form a minority government during a hung parliament. He acted in one of the most politically important and sensitive cases ever heard by the UK courts, in which he led its successful defence of the Labour Party National Executive Committee’s ruling on members’ entitlement to vote for the incumbent Leader of the Party in a leadership election.

Called by Gray’s Inn in1994; Doughty Street Chambers since 1998.

Mark won Legal Aid Barrister of the Year, the citation for which noted “his agility of intellect and encyclopaedic legal knowledge combined with his forensic attention to detail".

He secured the first ruling that the Home Secretary’s No Recourse to Public Funds policy was unlawful by reason of breach of the Public Sector Equality Duty to disabled people.

In the European Court of Human Rights, as well as leading  Article 8/private life and Article 10/free speech cases, he was lead counsel in the first successful Strasbourg challenge to confiscation under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, in which the ECtHR held that confiscation violated the right to peaceful enjoyment of property under A1, P1.

Mark developed and presented to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice the seminal challenge to the UK’s claimed opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which also established the legal position  across the EU on member states’ human rights duties when making interstate transfers of asylum seekers under the Dublin system. He was lead counsel, ultimately against the UK Attorney General, in a landmark case in which he defeated the UK’s claim to a unilateral right to suspend free movement rights. The AG told the ECJ Grand Chamber that “the issues are of exceptional importance from the perspective of the UK”.

Mark has also acted in public interest interventions at the highest level. He represented 14 such interveners in an internationally acclaimed case which established that no circumstances could permit the admission of evidence obtained through torture. He also acted for Liberty in an intervention arguing that the Special Advocate regime in terrorism cases was incompatible with common law constitutional rights and the ECHR.

He is regularly instructed as lead counsel against silks in both domestic and international courts in media, public, human rights, and immigration and asylum cases.

He has addressed conferences and seminars for organisations such as Justice, Legal Action Group, the Public Law Project, the Centre for European Legal Studies at Cambridge, and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. He has authored commentary and practitioner texts, including the Best Practice Guide to Asylum and Human Rights Appeals.

Mark is also heavily involved in improving the accessibility of the legal profession and the court system. He is Chair of the Bar Council Disability Panel and a member of its EDSM Committee, Chair of Doughty Street’s Disability Working Group, and a former member of the BSB Disability Taskforce. He also sits on HMCTS initiatives such as the RCJ Accessibility Project.

Beyond the law, he is a Board Trustee (and former Vice Chair) of the Spinal Injuries Association, and Chair of the Continuing Healthcare Alliance.

Administrative Law Bar Association

Bar European Group

Immigration Law Practitioners Association

Liberty

Ayr Academy; Oxford (BA Hons, law); Inns of Court School of Law.