Having access to justice is a source of power, that’s why Migrants Organise is fighting for a legal aid system that delivers justice for all.
In this blog, our organiser Frances Timberlake shares more about the Access to Justice Organising summit, held earlier this month.
On a very hot Friday 11th July 2025, 70 individuals organising to improve access to justice for migrants in the UK came together at a summit held in London to connect, build power and plan our collective work going forwards.
Most of the people in the room were members of an organising group that Migrants Organise and other groups have established to work collectively on fighting for sustainable access to legal aid for all migrants. It was the first of its kind, with attendees – from migrant justice organisations, legal aid law firms, grassroots migrant collectives, trade unionists and of course our migrant members – meeting and sharing experience on fighting for the restoration of legal aid.
The day was intended to provoke reflection on what real access to justice means for migrant and racialised communities and on how to harness the experience, knowledge and energy of different groups to take collective action around it rooted in care and solidarity.
Programme
Our opening panel kickstarted the day with reflections on the current climate for access to legal aid, and how to progress from here. Dr Jo Wilding (Sussex University) offered a brief history of legal aid, whilst Nanou Thassinda (Migrants Organise) and Juli Heider (Islington Law Centre) explored the role of both lawyers and migrants in the combined fight for appropriation of and resistance to the law. Keya Advani (Sistren Legal Collective) shared learnings from models of legal advice provision in other countries including India and Jamaica, reflecting on how this must broaden our vision of access to justice and radicalise our strategies for change.
The panel was followed by three powerful testimonies from people living the struggle to defend their own and others’ rights to access legal advice. Chukwuemerie* from the All African Women’s Group told her own story of fighting for access to legal aid and how that led her to take action as part of the self-help group, Salma from the City of Sanctuary in Sheffield shared her experience of going through the asylum and appeals process without a solicitor, and Úna Boyd from the Committee on the Administration of Justice in Northern Ireland spoke about the work of organising a successful immigration legal aid practitioners’ strike in Northern Ireland earlier in the year. All three speakers provided both grounding and inspiration for the day’s discussions.
The rest of the summit was made up of workshops and action planning sessions. Though some discussions were challenging, we maintained a commitment to listening to one another and to thinking beyond the confines of what change is ‘realistic’ to what change could be possible.
The three sets of workshops focused on different angles for organising:
- Worker organising
- Community lawyering and solidarity
- Legal education
Fighting for dignified work
Whilst much of our organising work on legal aid has until now focused on the power of organisations to speak out, we have spent less time thinking about the role of grassroots worker organising. Tanzil Chowdhury from Queen Mary University and author of the Legal Workers’ Inquiry – the first ever workers’ inquiry into the UK legal sector – facilitated energising discussions on the challenges for legal workers organising, such as competing interests created by a profit-driven model and concern for the impact on client communities, as well as the opportunities opened by framing the struggle for legal aid as a workers’ struggle. We drew heavily on the experience of striking immigration lawyers in Northern Ireland as inspiration for thinking what power would come from strike action elsewhere in the UK.
Building solidarity and community-centred models of legal support
This workshop, led by the Sistren Legal Collective and the Public Interest Law Centre, held space for reflection on practical ways to build solidarity within and between communities impacted by legal aid cuts. Whilst lawyers and the communities they work with are often positioned unequally in imposed hierarchies, or pitted against each other through law firms prioritising profit over care, in this workshop we used the lens of ‘community lawyering’ to share ways to overcome these divides, to democratise legal knowledge and to stand united against government hostility towards both migrants and lawyers.
Community education on legal aid
Ambassadors for Change, a community group supported by the Helen Bamber Foundation, came to test their newly-developed ‘know your rights’ workshop on navigating the legal aid system and to hold a discussion on the role of community legal education in wider organising efforts. They’ll now go on and run these workshops with community groups across London – power to them!
Following these workshops, we held three focused action planning sessions to move us closer to putting our ideas into concrete action and holding the government accountable for its destruction of our legal aid system. We talked about:
- public action and campaigning, hearing about historic and current examples of public demonstrations of support for legal aid and planning how we can continue to build on them;
- industrial action and what next steps would need to happen in order to build the bargaining power of legal workers and migrant communities, including the role of legal workers’ unions;
- turning self-help into collective action, learning about existing support tools in resisting the hostile environment and discussing how to build them into our organising work to increase our power.
The summit allowed people with different experiences of the legal aid crisis and immigration controls to connect, learn from one another and strategise together. We need spaces like this to grow our power and together to resist the intersection of state racism and austerity.
Attendees who shared feedback said the day was “reinvigorating”, “energising”, “inspiring”… and of course hot.
“It is painful to hear some people speak about the difficult experiences they have gone through. But this is precisely what motivates us to strive to make things better for everyone.”
“Hugely inspiring – what a joy to be among comrades fighting for better access to justice!”
With special thanks to the organisations and individuals who helped to organise the day and make our discussions both powerful and productive: South London Refugee Association, the Hope and Justice Collective, the All African Women’s Group, RAMFEL, Sistren Legal Collective, Public Interest Law Centre, Ambassadors for Change, South Yorkshire Refugee Law and Justice, Tanzil Chowdhury, and many others.
The fight continues!
More about our fight for Access to Justice
Good quality legal advice is essential for migrant and refugee communities to lay down roots, to lead settled, safe and secure lives and to resist injustice.
But for our members, everyday life has become a maze of complex anti-migrant rules and enforcement. This is compounded by a legal aid crisis meaning there are very few places to get advice.
We’re organising to change this. We are connecting lawyers, community groups, charities and social justice workers to call for a legal aid system that truly delivers access to justice.
We’ve worked on joint research projects such as on the impact of legal aid cuts on the public purse and on quality of legal aid work, we’ve built grassroots power to influence MPs and we’ve organised public actions such as one outside the Ministry of Justice to call for long-term investment into legal aid and another at the London Legal Walk in June 2025.
