Ben Douglas-Jones

Ben Douglas-Jones, led by John McGuinness QC appeared for the Crown in the conjoined appeals of R v Issa, Mulugeta and Firouzi [2015] EWCA Crim 6. The Court (Macur LJ giving the judgment) restated the principles in R v Mateta [2014] 1 WLR 1516, the recent leading case where a defendant’s representatives in the Crown Court fail to advise him that he has a defence to a document offence on the ground that he is an asylum seeker. BD-J also appeared in Mateta. Firouzi raises an important point of principle: where a defendant asserts that he should have been enabled to run an s.31 Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 defence in the Crown Court, it is not necessary in the Court of Appeal to adduce evidence in support of certain limbs of that defence.