Daniel Machover
Daniel Machover is head of the civil litigation department. He specialises in international human rights law, civil actions against the Home Office and police and in representing bereaved families at inquests into deaths in custody.
Daniel acts for the families of Shahid Aziz (killed by a white cell mate in Leeds prison in April 2004), Harry Stanley (shot by armed officers in Hackney in 1999) and Azelle Rodney (shot by armed police in north London in April 2005). From 1998 to 2004 he convened the Wormwood Scrubs Lawyers Group, which brought 56 successful civil claims for prisoners alleging assault and systemic management failures in Wormwood Scrubs prison. Test cases include: the right of prisoners to vote(R (on the applications of Pearson and Feal-Martinez) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2001] EWHC Admin 239); the frequency of review of lifers’ release dates (Hirst v. UK [2001] ECHR 477, July 2001; Fryers & another v. Rowe & Others [2003] EWCA Civ 655), regarding the right of prisoners to obtain police interviews of allegedly abusive prison officers; and the application of the Human Rights Act to officials acting outside the United Kingdom, (R (on the application of B and others) v Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2004] EWCA Civ 1344)
In 2001, Daniel received the Margery Fry Award from the Howard League for Penal Reform for ‘ensuring the protection of prisoners through tenacious pursuit of legal remedies’.
Daniel co-founded Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights in 1988 and is actively pursuing potential legal remedies in the UK and EU for Palestinian victims of alleged Israeli human rights abuses.
He is listed in Legal 500 as a leading individual in the field of Civil Liberties and Human Rights. Chambers UK 2008 says he is an "a very good technical lawyer, driven to fight passionately for his clients" and puts him in tier one on police actions, describing him as “a passionate believer in, and fighter for, his clients ”.
