When news broke of the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel, barrister Adam Wagner, like most in the UK Jewish community, was determined to reach out and offer support and assistance in the best way he could.
For some of us, the only realistic thing we could do was to wear a yellow ribbon badge on our jacket, in an attempt to remind the wider public of the plight of those held captive and murdered by terrorists in Gaza.
But ten days after the devastating attacks, the respected human rights lawyer received a telephone call from the MP Stella Creasy alerting him to the fact that one of her constituents, the British-Israel academic Sharone Lifshitz’s parents had been kidnapped and was there anything he could do to help.
Wagner’s close colleagues at the Doughty Street legal chambers had plenty of experience acting for detainees abroad, so he knew instantly who he could speak with to attempt to figure out what might be done to assist.
Working with his experienced legal colleague Adam Rose, from the Mischon De Reya firm, the pair began to offer legal and emotional support to Lifshitz, and five other families of 10 British-linked hostages on a pro bono (free) basis – including British-Israeli relatives of the now freed Eli Sharabi, Emily Damari and Ada Sagi.
Their role over the past 17 months has included meetings with successive Prime Ministers, Foreign Secretaries, numerous visits to the Foreign Office, discussions with Israeli officials and negotiators elsewhere.
It has won both Wagner and Rose widespread praise within the UK community, along with deserved newly achieved “mensch” status.
Adam Wagner is appointed to the King’s Counsel
Speaking to Jewish News, Wagner says his attempt to do his bit to assist families of those impacted by the horror of Oct 7 has been emotionally draining, but “incredibly rewarding” at the same time.
“However difficult it has been, it’s felt a lot better than not feeling we could do anything,” he reasons. “I think a lot of people in the community feel sort of impotent, especially from the UK.
“Being able to just focus on a few families in tremendous need and being able to give them support and do a little bit for them, I think, has been incredibly rewarding for us,” adds Wagner.
“But it has taken a lot out of us both emotionally. ”
“I have acted for a lot of bereaved families in very bad situations, I have done my whole career,” he says. “It’s not completely unknown to me, although the closeness of it, of being Jewish, adds a real extra difficulty to it, I think.”
Adam Wagner and Adam Rose seated at hostages meeting with PM Starmer and Foreign Sec Lammy
While 59 hostages remain captive in Gaza, including Avinatan Or, whose mother is British and who Wagner and Rose act for,, it is also difficult to talk of success and achievements. But there can be little doubt that Wagner, Rose, and the other lawyers who have assisted their campaign to assist hostage families achieved a real breakthrough in transforming the way the UK government approaches such a crisis.
In the weeks that immediately followed the Oct 7 massacre, it became apparent that for the first month, the UK government, under the then foreign secretary James Cleverly, was unable to assist in efforts to help the families of those held by Hamas in Gaza.
Things changed, Wagner confirmed in his speaking appearance at the Limmud in December 2023, with the appointment of Lord David Cameron as the new foreign secretary.
“One of our key strategic decisions early on was not to be political in any of our work,” says Wagner. “You will notice our statements are nonpolitical, we don’t blame governments, and we don’t take a side on issues, partly because our families represent the broadest range of political views you could imagine.
“But they are unified by wanting all of the hostages out. ”
Lawyers Adam Wagner and Adam Rose with hostage families outside Downing St
Wagner said the team did take a decision early on, on the advice of Richard Radcliffe, whose wife Nazanin was freed in 2022 after five years in a Tehran prison, and who offered his help, to be critical of the previous government’s initial failure “to take any responsibility at all” for the on-going crisis in Gaza.
Part of the plan included convincing Sharabi family member Steve Brisley, brother of Eli’s British wife Lianne, who was murdered along with her teenage daughters Yahel and Noiya, to openly criticise the government in a speech he gave at a Labour Friends of Israel event.
“David Cameron’s office got in touch with us and said he wants to meet with each family,” said Wagner, in response to that speech and a private event in Parliament, and a deal was struck with the Foreign Office to give special consular support to families living here, who had close British families, setting up the Gaza Hostages Team, led by an ambassador.
“That is who we have worked with ever since, and they’ve been pretty good,” says Wagner. “That approach has been unique worldwide, as far as we understand it.
“When Labour won the election, we immediately got on to David Lammy’s team to ask if they were going to carry it over, and they agreed to it in writing.”
Adam Wagner, Adam Rose and Dr Sharone Lifschitz give evidence to a parliamentary committee
Wagner is keen not to make political points but says current PM Sir Keir Starmer “has been really good… the families connect to him.”
Wagner adds: “Our strategy is to build personal connections between the British linked hostage families and the British government.
“We worked closely with two foreign secretaries and two prime ministers.”
Wagner reveals this “pretty simple approach” has led to the UK government arranging meetings for families with the Qatari negotiators “because they are close to Qatar.”
He continues: “If you think what the British government was going to do initially, which was nothing apart from ‘here’s a leaflet, sorry to hear about your dead relatives and the hostages but it’s nothing to do with us’ …
“They have gone from that, to regularly meeting with the families.
“Now you hear Keir Starmer speaking about it all the time, he spoke about Mandy Damari at his meeting with Donald Trump.
“We’ve been working with the foreign office on messaging all of the time. One of the things we urged them to do was rather than always tying the release of the hostages to a deal, we want them to say that the hostages should be released unconditionally and immediately because it is a war crime.
‘This is one thing that we can achieve. ”
After Starmer invited freed Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi to Downing Street earlier this month, Wagner wrote on social media about how moved he was by the interaction between the pair.
It had, he wrote on Linkedin “reflected the respect which I felt the UK’s most powerful man appropriately showed to a survivor who less than a month after he emerged from the most terrible ordeal any of us could imagine, had travelled the world to share his testimony. ”
“In the end, it was just human to human, and it moved me greatly,” Wagner added.
Sky News cover hostage families press conference
Wagner gives his parents at his childhood home in Manchester credit for his determination to act in a socially responsible manner, along with his maternal grandfather Fred Balcombe, who was a well-known community figure and became Lord Mayor of Manchester.
But his days with the progressive Habonim Dror Jewish youth movement, with whom Wagner travelled to Israel, and worked for a time as a leader, also had a clear impact on his career progression into the Bar.
After a gap year in Israel with Habonim, he had studied PPE at Oxford, having dropped English halfway through. With no intention of doing law at that time, Wagner, now 44, next worked for Habonim for a year as the Mazkir (National Secretary), then decided to do a Masters in Political Science at Columbia University in the States.
Ironically, in what could be seen as the first chapter of what is happening again today, professors at the institution faced claims they were anti-Israel during Wagner’s time studying in America.
“It was a national story at the time that there were professors who were seen as anti-Israel and as being hostile to Jewish students,” he recalls of the allegations raised in 2004 at the US university, with a film Columbia Unbecoming focusing on claims several professors had intimidated pro-Israel students. “I didn’t really understand it,” says Wagner. “I’d come from Oxford, or England to New York where there are lots of Jews. I felt extremely at home there.”
Wagner also recalls enjoying studying with the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi at Columbia. “He was also seen as quite controversial, but I thought he was fascinating,” he says.
“It was during the Iraq war, so it was a different time, post 9/11. I was completely taken by the War on Terror. Human rights just seemed to be the right direction for me.
“I wanted to do something that was socially activist. I was very much a Habonim-nik. It was very important to do something socially responsible, and that was progressive.”
A career in law would also offer Wagner the opportunity to earn a living, to live in London, rather than returning to his parent’s home, and entry into one of the real power bases of British society.
Adam Wagner speaks at Limmud 2023
Called to the Bar in 2007, Wagner founded the UK Human Rights Blog three years later which provides free, accessible updates on issues from data protection laws to civil liberties, and set up the charity EachOther (originally named RightsInfo) in 2015.
His work acting for the Campaign Against Antisemitism in the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s investigation into the Labour Party was rightly praised, as was his book Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why It Matters, which raised vital questions about emergency legislation signed into law by ministers as a result of the response to Covid.
Wagner moved to his current chambers Doughty Street in 2018. In recognition of the high esteem to which he now afforded he was appointed to the King’s Counsel on Monday.
But Wagner is under no illusion about the way in which human rights lawyers are viewed by some in the Jewish community today.
“There are Jewish lawyers in my area, but it’s different,” he reasons.
“Nowhere near as many as in other fields …. You know, the Jewish community is quite suspicious, quite sceptical of human rights.”
He later jokes about getting invited to Jewish legal drinks gatherings.
“You know,it’s funny, there’s 200 people in the room, and I don’t know any of them,” he laughs.
But on a more serious note, it is hard not to ignore the fact human rights lawyers have been the subject of increasingly vitriolic criticism and smears in recent years.
Nigel Farage posts attack on Richard Hermer KC on X
Jibes that those who practice in this field are “activist lawyers”, “leftie lawyers” or indeed “North London lawyers” have regularly entered political discourse, with all three slurs directed at Wagner at some stage.
Asked if this has impacted him, Wagner is honest: “It’s motivational for me,” he says.
“I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s fair. But I don’t care. My approach to life is that I do my thing, and I worry about my own integrity, and what I’m doing.”
He adds: “My approach has been to try to change the conversation, and the way that people talked about human rights.
“I took a view, with my Habonim hat on, you try to educate people. There is no point in complaining about everything.
“And you might also notice that a human rights lawyer is now our Prime Minister, it’s obviously not bothered the public too much…”
Asked what he thinks is meant though when politicians – including Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick – do use the term “North London lawyer” including repeatedly against our current Attorney General Richard Hermer, who is himself Jewish, Wagner is careful with his words.
“It depends, doesn’t it?” he opines. “The question being really, is it being said with a wink or not?
“When it’s being said with a wink you know exactly what it means – it means ‘the Jews’.
“That’s the obvious implication of a North London lawyer, and for that reason, nobody should use it.
“It’s very lazy, regardless of their views on Jewish people, it’s lazy and pandering to use that expression…. north London lawyer, we all know what that means.”
