Rushing to protect in the wake of Paris

The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 shocked the world. Few who followed the events of last Friday would have failed to be moved by the shocking images beamed across the globe.

Among the 129 innocent lives taken in last week's senseless wave of violence was that of 26-year-old Hogan Lovells associate Valentin Ribet. The 'brilliant' young white collar crime specialist undertook his legal training at Simmons & Simmons, Freshfields, and Reinhart Marville Torre, before completing a postgraduate LLM at the London School of Economics last year.

A victim of the Bataclan concert hall siege, Ribet joins a sadly ever-growing list of legal professionals who have fallen victim to indiscriminate acts of international terrorism. Among the 52 victims of the 2005 terror attacks in London was 29-year-old solicitor Fiona Stevenson of Reynolds Dawson, who died in the bombing at Aldgate.

Australian lawyer Garth McEvoy was one of seven people killed during the 2009 bombing of the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, while the devastating Bali bombings of 2012 took the lives of 202 people, including British lawyers Timothy Arnold and Dan Miller.

NautaDutilh partner John Allen and his family were slain when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was brought down over the Ukraine in July 2014. The next month saw teenage BPP law student Vivian Chan killed in the Bangkok bomb. And Katrina Dawson, a 38-year-old barrister of Eight Selborne Chambers, died during the Sydney café siege last December.

The list goes on and on. Emotions understandably run high in the aftermath of such horrific events. Unfortunately, a rush to comment can lead to embarrassment, invariably attaching itself to ones employers and profession.

Following the killing of 17 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery in Paris in January, Clifford Chance found itself at the centre of controversy when one of its trainees launched a tirade against western concepts of freedom of speech.

In what can only be described as verbal diarrhoea on YouTube, the aspiring solicitor proclaimed that 'we would not be here had it not been for the fact that the kuffar had gone to our lands and killed our people and raped and pillaged our resources'.

In a perhaps equally misjudged decision this week, a Skadden associate proclaimed it was okay to care more about the Paris attacks than the equally brutal Beirut bombings 24 hours earlier. Writing in the Washington Post, New York-based Maxim Mayer-Cesiano opined that the tragedies in Beirut and Paris shouldn't get the same kind of coverage because the Lebanese capital 'has been a war zone several times in the last 30 years'.

The assault on Paris also comes at a time when the government hopes to pass its controversial 'Snooper's Charter'. In the wake of the attacks, Lord Carlile QC, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, called for the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be 'expedited' through parliament so it becomes law by the end of the year.

Knee-jerk reactions are not what are needed, however. In October, the Law Society and the Bar Council warned politicians not to 'sleepwalk' into approving a Bill that has already been condemned by lawyers and civil liberties groups as failing to include basic privacy safeguards.

It is worth noting that the French parliament rushed to approve sweeping changes to its surveillance powers in the wake of the January terrorist attacks, in a move that was described by Amnesty International as 'a major blow to human rights'. Yet these powers did little to stop the perpetrators of last week's atrocities.

Parliament would be remiss in allowing a Bill to pass into law without proper scrutiny, let alone one with huge implications for such a fundamental human right as privacy. Our fear now should not be in sleep walking the Bill through parliament, but in sprinting it towards the finishing line.

John van der Luit-Drummond is deputy editor for Solicitors Journal