It was a morning in the High Court. I was a pupil barrister sitting with a treasury solicitor behind a junior member of chambers responding to an ‘immigration list’ of applications for permission for judicial review.

The room was grand and forbidding with its old wood-panelling and strict protocol, worthy of any cinematic depiction of British justice. It was a day like so many others during my training. Still, someone stood out. A young woman (I think originally from Uganda) had an application in the list and her solicitor was late. I read her papers which, amongst other things, asserted multiple incidents of torture and rape before her escape to the UK.

Her case was called early on, but as no representative emerged, the court obliged by putting her to the end of the list. When the other matters had all been heard, the woman referred to as ‘Ms T’ was asked to come forward to the innermost bar, in front even of where the QCs sit, to “make your application for permission for judicial review”.

She promptly burst into tears, and the government lawyer, just as uncomfortable as I was, handed me the phone number of a leading legal aid firm, indicating that I should phone for help for our opponent.

That memory has haunted me for over 25 years. There are now so many more like it that it is hard adequately even to do justice to the telling of the denials of rights that mark out our legal system nearly a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. So, I am grateful to Jon Robins and Dan Newman for the fine work of reportage, scholarship and advocacy that follows.

Human rights are not, as some would have us believe, a devalued currency of lawyers’ tricks for clogging up a sausage machine of administrative convenience. They are about the protection of everything that a person needs to live with a modicum of dignity. That covers social and economic rights to food, shelter and the basic means of existence, and civil and political rights to fair trials and family life, and against discrimination. The bridge between the two is ‘access to justice’ or the advice and representation without which all other protections remain beyond reach.