Mr Sirel studied law, he says, largely because he had the grades and it seemed like something he could “have a go at”. Not much about the first two years stirred his interest. It was only in third and fourth year, when he found human rights law, that he began to enjoy himself – and even then, he wasn’t sure being a lawyer was really the plan. “I knew I wanted to work in social justice and human rights, but it wasn’t clear to me at that point in time that I wanted to be a lawyer,” he says. 

That changed after graduation. He finished his undergraduate degree in 2009, “right in the middle of the economic crash,” and his master’s the following year, before an internship at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg turned into a job. “At that point in time I realised that perhaps I should play to my strengths,” he says. “From there, things sort of escalated.” 

Back home, he trained at Maclay, Murray & Spens – now part of Dentons – but knew within the two years of his traineeship that he wanted to return to social justice work. An opening came up at a Glasgow law centre specialising in helping migrant women and children. “I was lucky with that job,” he says. “It came at exactly the right time, and I was the right person for it.” He spent two-and-a-half years there before co-founding JustRight Scotland with three colleagues from the same law centre in 2017. 

They began the organisation, quite literally, around each other’s living-room tables. “We didn’t have an office at the beginning,” Mr Sirel recalls. “We were starting at the very beginning with things like – we need stationery, where are we getting that? We need a printer, where are we getting that from?” Seed money and early grants from the Legal Education Foundation and Unbound Philanthropy – funders who still support the organisation today – got the fledgling charity on its feet. “We had an awful lot of help from friends and family, and a lot of help from professionals and funders in the sector who were excited to see something new come along and were willing to put their faith in us. I hope nine years later we’ve managed to repay that.” 

That faith appears to have paid off. From three-and-a-half staff in 2017, JustRight Scotland now employs 25 people and turns over around £1.7 million a year. It runs four legal teams: one working with migrant women and children, including unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, trafficking survivors and family reunion cases; an anti-trafficking team representing survivors of human trafficking and exploitation; the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre, run in partnership with Rape Crisis Scotland and the University of Strathclyde Law Clinic, providing legal representation and advice to women affected by domestic abuse; and a team litigating test cases across equalities, discrimination and Human Rights Act issues. 

Growing the next generation of lawyers in the field, Mr Sirel says, remains a challenge. JustRight Scotland scrapped an early volunteer legal internship programme on ethical grounds. “Running a free volunteer programme excludes a lot of people who can’t afford to work for free,” he says. “That goes along social and economic lines, it goes along racial lines, it goes along gender.” The organisation now provides funded internships through the Robertson Trust, some universities, and takes on one trainee every two years via the Justice First Fellowship – but he argues the wider sector needs to do more, suggesting some of Scotland’s larger law firms could sponsor opportunities to work in different areas of the law. 

The pandemic tested the organisation early in its life. JustRight Scotland went fully remote within about 48 hours, at a time when its work depended on face-to-face contact with highly vulnerable, often traumatised clients – some of whom, having sought asylum in Scotland, had been moved into hotel accommodation. “I have to say, I thought: will we survive this?” Mr Sirel says. In the event, funders recognised the increased need and the organisation grew rather than shrank. The switch to remote and hybrid working also let it reach clients well beyond Glasgow and Edinburgh, in places like Aberdeen, Inverness and the Western Isles that had previously had little or no specialist provision. “That’s been a bit of a game changer from our perspective,” he says. 

A typical week combines supervising his team’s casework, seeing his own clients – migrant women and children, young people going through the asylum process, survivors of trafficking – court hearings at the Court of Session in Edinburgh or the immigration and asylum tribunal in Glasgow, and policy work. Shortly before speaking to Scottish Legal News, Mr Sirel had been drafting his team’s evidence to the Westminster Public Bill Committee on the new immigration and asylum bill; JustRight Scotland also regularly submits evidence to Holyrood and delivers training to civil servants and social workers. 

There have been significant highlights: JustRight Scotland brought Scotland’s first successful civil damages action for rape following a ‘not proven’ verdict in the criminal courts – the Miss M case, in 2017-18 – which helped launch the campaign that eventually led to the abolition of the third verdict at the beginning of this year. In 2022, the organisation successfully challenged Scottish student funding rules that treated young people who had grown up in Scotland, but lacked settled immigration status, as international students; the judicial review found the regulations breached the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Scottish government changed the law accordingly after vital work from the accompanying “Our Grades Not Visas” campaign. JustRight Scotland is also acting in a closely watched case concerning a death in the custody of the Scottish Prison Service, with judgment awaited, and has spent recent years helping reunite families in Scotland with relatives who were in, or had just escaped, Gaza. A current case for the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre is testing whether the ambulance service can be held vicariously liable for a sexual assault allegedly carried out by an ambulance technician against a client. 

On legal aid, in which he has now worked for just over 12 years, Mr Sirel is blunt, saying it is “an antiquated system that does not meet the needs of those it’s supposed to serve”. JustRight Scotland alone now receives between 60-140 referrals a month, though resource constraints mean that only a fraction can be accepted. Some parts of the country, including Aberdeen, have no immigration and asylum legal aid practitioners at all, despite the area having hosted large numbers of asylum seekers in recent years. He is cautiously hopeful about a Scottish government consultation on wholesale legal aid reform due in October. 

He is more troubled by the wider political climate and is wary of simple solutions to complex problems, citing Brexit as a case in point: “It was pitched as going to solve all the problems, and it’s in fact solved none and made more problems.” In response to an uptick in anti-immigration violence, JustRight Scotland now carries out its own risk assessments and has removed staff photographs from its website; colleagues at partner organisations have been targeted by online far-right groups, and clients have faced harassment, threats and, at times, assault “just for being who they are.” For him, addressing these tensions begins with greater tolerance and pluralism, and with more public figures – particularly those in power – willing to speak honestly, defend their principles, and focus on making people “happy instead of angry.”