Jonathan Mark Swift

Sir Jonathan Swift   (Judge)
Born	11 September 1964
Alma mater	New College (Oxford), Emmanuel College (Cambridge)
Spouse	Helen Evans

Sir Jonathan Mark Swift is a British High Court judge.

Jonathan Swift was born in Rochford, England and was educated at Southend High School for Boys. He studied at New College, Oxford and completed a BA in 1987. He followed this with an LLM at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1988.

In June 2018, in an interview with Anthony Inglese, Jonathan Swift said:

"The only court you absolutely have to win in, is the last one." Jonathan Swift QC of 11 KBW, formerly government’s top counsel, reflects on his UK/Supreme Court victory last year for HM Revenue & Customs in the Littlewoods case, dubbed by the legal press as the ‘Case of the Century’ ([2017] UKSC 70).

He saved the public purse £17bn claimed as compound interest on VAT overpayments stretching back to 1973 when the UK entered the EEC.

Background

Jonathan Swift was called to the bar at Inner Temple in 1989 and practised from 11 King's Bench Walk. He was First Treasury Counsel from 2007 to 2014 and took silk in 2010. He served as a recorder from 2010 to 2018 and was appointed deputy High Court judge in 2016.

On 1 October 2018, Swift was appointed a judge of the High Court and assigned to the Queen's Bench Division. He took the customary knighthood in the same year. Since 2020, he has been judge in charge of the Administrative Court.

Asylum seekers

On 10 June 2022, he ruled deportation flights of unsuccessful asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda should be allowed to proceed as there was material public interest in doing so. He further said that the risks posed to refugees was "in the realms of speculation".

Julian Assange

On 8 June 2023, Craig Murray tweeted:

After ten months, Julian Assange's appeal against extradition is dismissed with no hearing in just three pages of A4 - by Sir Jonathan Swift, the same right wing judge who ruled deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was legal.

Swift's Wikipedia page stated on 11 June 2023:

On 8 June 2023, he rejected the appeal of political prisoner Julian Assange's legal team, which had filed two appeals against the kangaroo court and Priti Patel's decision to extradite the award-winning Wikileaks founder being indicted by the United States under the Espionage Act for exposing war crimes to the general public.

Justice Swift rejected the vast breadth of evidence further indicating the political and farcical nature of the case on the grounds that he is a bootlicker and can't be bothered to read more material than a middle school student for one of the most important cases regarding journalism and press freedom.

Craig Murray returned to the charge on 15 June 2023 with "Assange: An Unholy Masquerade of Tyranny Disguised as Justice".

Family

In 2008, Jonathan Swift married Helen Evans with whom he has a son and a daughter.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Assange Final Appeal Day 2 – Your Man in the Public Gallery	blog post	29 February 2024	Craig Murray	Initially US authorities were keen to downplay the possible sentence, but have radically changed tack and now emphasise 30 to 40 years as the norm, which is in effect a rest of life sentence. That shift, together with the refusal so far to rule out the death penalty, gives a measure of the ruthlessness with which the CIA is pursuing the extradition of Julian Assange.
Document:Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery	blog post	21 February 2024	Craig Murray	The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”. That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.
Document:Julian Assange to make final appeal in extradition case	Article	9 June 2023	Mark Lowe	According to RSF, the upcoming appeal represents Assange’s final opportunity to contest extradition within the UK, unless he decides to bring his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 8 June 2023.
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