Our focus on refugees

Our stories

Within the firm we have been sharing our stories including families escaping Franco’s Spain, surviving the India-Pakistan partition, escaping Cyprus following invasion, and fleeing the civil war in Sri Lanka. Each story has taught us so much – about history, politics and religion. As Sebastian, our senior partner, observed “Refugees are not “others”. As our stories show, they are us.”

This topic is particularly pertinent now as reports suggest that 2020 has seen the highest levels of displacement on record, with an estimated 79m people currently displaced worldwide.

So, in recent months we have been running a programme focused on supporting refugees. We have volunteered for refugee charities, attended talks to educate ourselves on the situation that refugees around the world face and we have been sharing our own family stories of displacement.

I often think of my grandparents’ experiences and the way they responded to adversity.

Sebastian Prichard Jones Senior Partner

Holocaust Memorial Day

We previously marked Holocaust Memorial Day with a seminar hosted by artist and author Edmund de Waal, together with our own Stephen Kon. Edmund is known for large-scale porcelain installations as well as his award-winning book “The Hare with Amber Eyes” in which he recounts how his family lost almost everything in 1938. Although the Nazi’s confiscated his family’s property, a collection of small Japanese carvings, netsuke, were hidden and later recovered, providing a thread from which Edmund could unravel his family history. Stephen’s father was the only member of his family to escape Poland and to survive World War II. He found his way to England in 1942 and Stephen recounted how his life and 40-year career as an EU/competition lawyer have been highly influenced by his father’s refugee experiences.