Letter: Sibghat Kadri obituary

Sibghat Kadri sought to humanise the law. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

The 1971 Immigration Act was a novel and complex piece of legislation. As a young barrister, Sibghat Kadri argued a number of the early cases on it, seeking to humanise it so far as feasible. After he argued one of these cases before the lord chief justice’s court (a pretty intimidating forum), the government’s standing counsel, Gordon Slynn, said to me that Sibghat’s was by far the best argument he had heard on the legislation’s meaning and effect.

Sibghat’s characteristic response, when I told him, was: “He can afford to say that. He won.”