Jacqueline McKenzie

She leads a team which specialises in a wide range of immigration matters, including cases representing asylum seekers and refugees, people facing deportation at the end of criminal sentences, administrative removal, EU citizens seeking settlement post Brexit, undocumented migrants seeking regularised status, claimants seeking entry clearance or citizenship, and victims of modern slavery.  Her team also acts in actions against the state, including for unlawful detention and false imprisonment, and in claims of discrimination and racism against a range of defendants.  Her work covers acting in the first instance, but also in the senior courts and the European Court of Human Rights.  

For the past six years she has emerged as the UK’s leading advocate for victims of the Windrush Scandal.  In addition to representing hundreds of claimants, she was a member of the Independent Advisory Group set up by the government to oversee the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, sat on the Home Office’s Windrush Stakeholder’s Advisory Group, sat on the Administrative Justice Council’s review of the Windrush Compensation Scheme, and conducted research for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation into the capacity of community sector organisations to respond to the scandal, leading to the establishment of a fund for capacity building of £1 million.  She gave oral and written evidence to the Parliamentary Home Affairs and Justice Committees on the Windrush Compensation Scheme, and the conditions of female foreign nationals in UK prisoners, and has an academic article published in the Discrimination Law Journal on the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.   

Jacqueline’s current work includes representing NGOs at the ECtHR who have been granted permission to intervene in an Article 3 ECHR same sex  case involving Switzerland, representing asylum seekers from Sri Lanka who are detained in the British Indian Overseas Territory of Diego Garcia, representing a potential victim of modern slavery who was one of 6 people due to be flown to Rwanda under the UK government’s Migration and Economic Development, Partnership with that country, and is taking action against the British government for the conditions in which asylum seekers in the UK were held in the Manston short term immigration holding facility. Her anti-discrimination work includes reparations, and children treated unfairly, due to their race, in the British school system.