Anne-Marie Hutchinson OBE, QC (Hon)

OBITUARY

Anne-Marie Hutchinson OBE, QC (Hon)

1st August 1957 – 2nd October 2020

Anne-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.

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.

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 version of going the extra mile, which could involve temporarily putting up displaced clients at her Twickenham home.

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.

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.

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 communal and she went about constructing what grew into a highly respected team of practitioners, literally from all corners. Anne-Marie was a mover and shaker in taking young lawyers with languages, qualifications, educational and professional experience from abroad. At one point, we calculated that Dawson Cornwell could sing near on 50 different national anthems. She tutored but did not micromanage. She worked on the “there’s five ways to run a case” principle. “Three of them will be right, two of them wrong” she would say. “It may be not one I’d choose, but as long it’s one of the three that’s right, fine by me”. She encouraged her charges to think for themselves, although perish the poor pilgrim who occasionally opted for one of the two that was wrong. It is that group of talented and highly motivated lawyers who she has left behind which is her true legacy.

She had a long list of professional accolades, including:

■ Queen’s Counsel honoris causa (2016) for her efforts to get countries to sign up to the Hague Convention and her work in forced marriage;

■ Honorary Doctorate of Laws (2016), University of Leeds;

■ The prestigious Presidential Medal of the International Academy of Family Lawyers (2014);

■ Top 50 Women Super Lawyers (2013);

■ Top 100 UK Super Lawyers (2013);

■ The inaugural International Family Lawyer of the Year, Jordan’s Family Law Awards (2012);

■ “Albert” from the Albert Kennedy Trust in recognition of her work on the international level for defending the human rights of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people (2011);

■ True Honour Award, IKWRO (Iranian Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation) (2011);

■ Outstanding International Woman Lawyer Award, International Bar Association (2010);

■ Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year (2004) for her work with victims of forced marriage;

■ OBE for services to international child abduction and international adoption (2002 New Years’ Honours List);

■ The inaugural UNICEF Child Rights Lawyer Awards (1999);

■ She was Times Lawyer of the Week (unusually twice) in 2006 and 2016.

Despite her many deserving accolades, what meant more to her were the messages and cards she received from clients she’d helped over the decades. She’d quite often get a text from an old client saying that she was together with her children and they will never forget her, or from one woman whom Anne-Marie had rescued from a forced marriage and who went on to work for the UN.

We have seen, in the many wonderful condolences we have received about her, references that Anne-Marie could be a bit scary and frightening. This of course was just another of her brilliant presentational stratagems to disguise the fact that in reality she could be seriously terrifying. You don’t achieve as she did without a touch of steel however it was inevitably and quickly followed by a joke, a characterful, and often indiscreet, anecdote and when required an arm around the shoulder.

It is often said about family law that there are no winners or losers. The end result of a financial divorce settlement is usually measured in by degrees; parties can feel hurt and distress at outcomes but rarely is it a matter of life and death. The family law practised by Anne-Marie, however, played out for the highest stakes. For her clients who were victims of forced marriage, so-called “honour” based violence, at risk of FGM or stranded spouses, losing was not an option and it mattered to her above anything else that they rarely if ever did. Get asset back at first instance, then appeal, don’t achieve a better outcome on appeal take it to the next level if necessary pro bono. Dawson Cornwell habitually had more reported cases a year than any other firm in the country.

That is why adrenaline, even to the very end, was an important constituent part of what might loosely be described as her diet; caffeine, nicotine and the occasional after work bottle of vino with colleagues and friends seemed to make up the rest, which no doubt accounted for her waif-like figure. Her larger than life personality will live on at Dawson Cornwell. It is seeped into the fabric of the place and the ethos of its practitioners; how could it not be. To coin the old Rodgers and Hammerstein lyric, she was – “A hundred-and-one pounds of fun, every inch packed with dynamite”.

Anne-Marie leaves behind three surviving siblings Geraldine, Paul and Catherine as well as her two beloved children, daughter Catherine and son Sam. She bravely fought off her terrible illness, just long enough, proudly to see Sam take up a place at Kings College and Catherine both to present her with a lovely granddaughter Emmeline Marie (Marie being her middle name and Anne-Marie’s name sake) and to marry Emmeline’s father and her long term partner Murray. ■

Anne-Marie Hutchinson