OBITUARY
Anne-Marie Hutchinson OBE, QC (Hon) 1st August 1957 – 2nd October 2020
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Anne-Marie Hutchinson
nne-Marie’s partners and colleagues at Dawson Cornwell are coming to terms with her sad passing on Friday at the tender age of 63. Yes, we have known for some time she was seriously ill (she asked us to keep it to ourselves). Yes, we knew she was fighting insurmountable odds. Yes, we knew this day would come. But even so it still was a blow because defying insurmountable odds was Anne-Marie’s raison d’etre. Up until very recently, she would contribute with emails and texts on the day to day life of the practice and maintain a sharp eye on what we were all up to.
version of going the extra mile, which could involve temporarily putting up displaced clients at her Twickenham home.
Anne-Marie was one of six children and a proud member of England’s Irish Catholic diaspora, born in Donegal but brought up ironically in Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentary constituency of Huntingdon. She regaled us with stories of how her mother (a nurse) never let her father (a barber with a clientele consisting mainly of US airmen from the nearby airbase) off the hook for bringing them to live there next to the prominent town centre statute of that b***ard. Anne-Marie had the last laugh, on those of us pitiful Saxons, flaunting her Irish passport and retained freedom of movement, taking a read-this-and-weep attitude to those of her colleagues obliged to become former citizens of the European Union.
However next came her full on assault on Forced Marriage. To Anne-Marie this was not a question of a clash of cultures. It was plain and simple, a respect for human rights; we either all have them or none of us do. She didn’t just tackle this here with a cunning dusting off of wardship proceedings and resurrecting nullity, but also she went on missions with Foreign Office officials and judges to the heart of the matter; countries where this might take place. Persuasive and impressive the result was that there were no longer any safe havens for this practice. Anne-Marie worked with organisations and police looking after these young people when they returned, often alienated from nuclear and extended family alike and then employing the hitherto little used procedure of nullity as a method for erasing these illegitimate unions from history, so that the “marriage” never existed. Her colleagues looked on in awe, putting our mundane gripes about the imminent meltdown of the court service into perspective.
She left school early by today’s standards and took what for then was a respectful position for a girl, but working in a bank wasn’t enough. She did A levels at college, smashed them and secured a place at Leeds University to read modern history and politics graduating (of course she did) with a First. Even a golden child like Anne-Marie needed a mentor and she found one in Jack Bleiman, a family law practitioner and litigator at the north London practice of Beckman & Beckman where she took articles. Jack was a member of his own diaspora, that wave of progressive South African lawyers, who escaped the corrupted jurisprudence of apartheid, a group who so enhanced the English legal profession, where achieving justice was still possible irrespective of creed, colour, religion and as it was starting to evolve gender/sexual orientation. Being a woman in the law in the 1980’s was no cakewalk but Anne-Marie was unfazed, working hard and playing hard. She was socially a bit of a wild child (and great fun with it) but professionally she had a drive and determination that was off the Richter Scale. She was admitted as a solicitor in 1985. It was at Beckman’s she started to forge a reputation for taking on cases and championing causes that had her more faint hearted contemporaries (then mostly male) taking refuge behind the sofa. This was the genesis of the child abduction treaty, the Hague Convention, and she seized it by the throat getting to grips with its technicalities and honing the running of these cases to a fine art. This was the stuff of dragging the Emergency Judge out of his bath in the early hours, securing a return order and going air side at Heathrow to lift a snatched child off a plane so they could be sent back to their country of origin. This was the stuff of going to Gaddafi’s Libya and rescuing a snatched babe in arms from a flat above a Café/Restaurant and bringing the child back to England armed only with an English High Court order, and its Arabic translation bearing many stamps and seals which fortunately for Anne-Marie impressed the Libyan cops. There is going the extra mile for clients and there is Anne-Marie’s 18 | CENTRAL LONDON LAWYER
She was rightly dubbed by the 2001/2002 Chambers the “queen of child abduction” but that wasn’t the end, it wasn’t even the beginning of the end but merely the end of a beginning. By this time, because she always saw the big picture, she had thrown herself into the charity Reunite with a view to supporting those parents where other family members had abducted their child abroad. That of itself would be enough to constitute an impressive professional legacy.
Next, stranded spouses; again not a culture clash but an affront to human rights; mothers separated from young children and cut adrift in their country of origin. This time, the battle was often with rather than on the side of government employing judicial nudges in securing these spouses’ leave to come back to the UK to be reunited with their child. This generated much technical jurisprudence where immigration, human rights and family law all overlapped. Rather than be overwhelmed (blimey what have I started) Anne-Marie’s approach was “bring it on“. Then came surrogacy, an emerging area particularly as (although not exclusively by any means) it ran in parallel with the recognition not just of same sex marriage but same sex families. Again she saw it as a human right that potential parents, not able biologically together to have children were entitled to family life and should not be reduced to having to acquire it through shady back street transactions. A section of society saw this as controversial, a threat to the traditional concept of family life but a decade and more on not only did the sky not fall in but these alternative families are now part of our day to day life. Of Anne-Marie’s many impressive qualities, she was above all a “teacher”. As précised above this barely scratches the surface of how she raised our jurisprudential consciousness. She literally travelled the world, at conferences and seminars to deliver master classes of her experience and knowledge; something with which she was endlessly generous. On a personal and colleague level, simply by a process of osmosis it was difficult not to be inspired by just sharing the same space with such a phenomenon. However what she also gave was the gift of time. She mentored and cultivated young lawyers to do what she could do. There was no property in knowledge for her, it was
