The 36 Group

36 Public & Human Rights

Raphael practises in asylum, immigration and nationality law. He appears regularly in the Upper Tribunal, the Administrative Court and the Court of Appeal.

Raphael accepts instructions from law firms and members of the public ("direct access"). He has been praised by instructing solicitors as dedicated and willing to go the extra mile for clients. His advocacy has been described as "exemplary".

Raphael's main interest is strategic litigation: working in partnership with solicitors to identify new legal points, training caseworkers to spot them, and advising early in order to test the issues on appeal. The aim is to build cases with overwhelmingly strong evidence, and develop arguments to test and change the law.

An example is the successful campaign to secure settlement rights for the children of Gurkha veterans: working closely with Howe & Co. Solicitors, Raphael developed a case preparation template based on causation and historic injustice, and developed the arguments (adopted by the other parties) which were accepted by the Court of Appeal in R (Gurung) v SSHD [2013] 1 WLR 2546. The Upper Tribunal then developed the case law further, recognising that historic injustice will "normally require" a decision in an appellant's favour (Ghising and others (Ghurkhas/ BOCs- historic wrong- weight) [2013] UKUT 567 (IAC)). As a result, the Home Office modified its policy.

Before coming to the bar, Raphael was a successful broadcaster and foreign correspondent, working for the BBC and other international news outlets. He reported on the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the Albanian uprising in 1997 and separatist violence in Macedonia.

Call: 2006

Italian and French

Administrative Law Bar Association (ALBA) Immigration Law Practioners Association (ILPA)