78 1GM Saturday October 17 2020 | the times
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Hutchinson saw herself as an outsider
If not for Anne-Marie Hutchinson, the
High Court might never have heard the
case of K, a British Sikh girl who one
day vanished. K’s sister, ostracised from
her family for entering into a relation-
ship of which they disapproved, asked
around her community to find out
where K had gone. She was convinced
that her parents had sent K to India to
force her into marriage. Sure enough,
she received a letter from K, telling her
that she was imprisoned in a relative’s
house in India and about to be married
against her will.
K’s sister approached Hutchinson, a
solicitor at Dawson Cornwell, in the
hope of obtaining a court order to have
her returned to Britain before the
marriage could take place. Hutchinson
knew that the High Court would be
hesitant to hear the case, not only
because in 1999 there was no precedent
for how to deal with the abduction of a
child by her own parents, but because it
feared being accused of racism.
Yet if anyone could convince the
court to hear the case, it was Hutchin-
son, who had dealt with many disturb-
ing instances of child abduction before.
One case had resulted in her flying to
Libya, equipped with an Arabic transla-
tion of a court order, to rescue an
abducted baby. Another case had
required her to march on to the runway
at Heathrow to retrieve a child from a
plane waiting for take-off.
She was an unrelenting advocate (or,
in her own words, a “stroppy cow”), who
worked on cases late into the night,
powered, it seemed, only by coffee,
cigarettes and moral indignation. “Any-
body who deals with me will say ‘She’s
great company outside the office but a
nightmare to deal with’,” she said. “I just
like to get on with stuff but I do get out-
raged at some of the things people do.
You can’t go around stealing children or
forcing your teenager to get married. I
find that really offensive.”
Together with the barrister Henry
Setright, Hutchinson convinced the
High Court to make K its ward, allow-
ing it to override her parents’ wishes
and order her return to the United
Kingdom. This established the prece-
dent that, in Hutchinson’s own words,
“even if parents are acting within their
parental authority to arrange a mar-
riage for their child, if that child does
not want that marriage, that child,
although not an adult, can oppose it”. In
2014 it became a crime to force some-
one into marriage, punishable by up to
seven years in prison.
Hutchinson assisted in the protec-
tion of more than 150 victims of forced
marriage, as well as many young
women threatened with genital mutila-
tion. She was also a specialist in all areas
of domestic and international family
law: for instance in international custo-
dy disputes, divorce and surrogacy. To
foster co-operation with the jurisdic-
tions to which victims of forced mar-
riage are most often abducted, she
travelled to remote locales, such as
Pakistan’s mountainous hinterlands, to
win over the local judges who hardly
knew what to make of her.
As well as being appointed OBE in
2002 for services to international adop-
tion and the prevention of inter-
national child abduction, she was twice
the Times lawyer of the week. In her
second appearance in The Times she
said that she would like to be remem-
bered as “a passionate and innovative
lawyer with the best shoes, boots and
handbags in family law”.
Anne-Marie Hutchinson was born in
Donegal in 1957, one of six children of
Gerry, a barber, and Kitty, a nurse. A
proud member of the Irish Catholic
diaspora, she was brought up, ironically,
in Oliver Cromwell’s constituency of
Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. Her
parents referred to the lord protector as
“that bastard”. Leaving school at 16, she
went to work in a bank, though later she
returned to technical college where she
got straight As in her A levels.
She applied to study international
history and politics at the University of
Leeds because “it was the hardest place
to get into”. While there she got many of
her meals at a fish and chip shop called
Sweaty Betty’s, later saying that “by the
end of term we’d be living off chips and
what was called ‘sweet and sour sauce’,
which was really just jam and vinegar. Ihaven’t been able to look at sweet and
sour sauce since.”
After graduation Hutchinson had no
definite idea of what she wanted to do
next. She thought that the Foreign
Office might be an interesting place to
work, but did not think she would get in,
so instead she took articles at Beckman
& Beckman, a north London law firm.
There she came under the wing of Jack
Bleiman, who encouraged her to switch
from commercial and civil litigation to
family law, and helped her to become a
partner before she was 30.
Bleiman and Hutchinson were both,
in their own ways, outsiders in the legal
chumocracy — he a progressive South
African lawyer who had escaped apart-
heid, she the daughter of Irish Catholics
who never considered herself English.
She quickly outpaced rivals whose sex
and class had given them a head start,
and enjoyed being rude about those
who felt the bar was their birthright.
With a glass of wine in one hand and a
cigarette in the other, she would plum-May 1953. It was to be a glittering occa-
sion, attended by leading figures from
East Germany and the Soviet Union.
The couple, who recalled being
watched steadily by the secret police,Obituaries
Anne-Marie Hutchinson
Leading family lawyer who fought relentlessly in cases of forced marriage
mily impersonate their airs and graces.
Of one senior lawyer she noted: “He’s a
f***ing dinosaur, isn’t he? Hit him on
the tail and 20 minutes later his brain
will twitch.” Yet beneath that bolshy,
irreverent manner was an uncynical
sense of justice. She took on an unusual
number of cases pro bono, and even put
up displaced clients in her home in
Twickenham.
She left Beckman & Beckman for a
nine-month stint at Margaret Bennett
Solicitors, then, in 1998, joined Dawson
Cornwell. There she built up an inter-
national team — at one point they
calculated that together they knew the
words to nearly 50 national anthems.
As someone whose background was
hardly typical of the legal profession,
she knew the value of a diversity of
outlooks. As a boss she was steely but
not overbearing, telling her practition-
ers: “There are five ways to run a case.
Three of them will be right, two of them
wrong. You may not pick the one I’d
choose, but as long it’s one of the three
that’s right, fine by me.”
Although she wouldn’t hide it if she
was annoyed or disappointed by a
member of her team, neither would she
let a dark cloud linger over the office.
She always had an anecdote, often scur-
rilous, with which to lighten the mood,
and particularly enjoyed telling the
story of a father in a forced marriage
case who repeatedly denied owning a
phone, only for his to ring in court.
Alongside her cases she did a greatdeal of work with charities, including
Reunite, which provides support to ab-
ducted children. She believed it was in-
cumbent upon the government to create
support networks for victims of forced
marriage, who without help might be
forced to return to abusive homes.
She was never married, but had two
children by different fathers: Catherine,
who is an office administrator at Daw-
son Cornwell, and Sam, who has just
begun an undergraduate degree at
King’s College London. Having strug-
gled with lung cancer, Hutchinson
lived just long enough to see Cather-
ine’s baby daughter, Emmeline Marie.
She hardly told anyone about her ill-
ness, and up until the last weeks of her
life she was still emailing colleagues,
checking on the progress of their cases
and offering advice.
Although she received a bevy of
awards for her work, including the
Queen’s Counsel honoris causa in 2016,
she said that she thought the true
reward of her work was “the texts from
girls under their code names at Christ-
mas, the pictures sent to me on Face-
book and the texts at New Year from
clients saying they’re sitting with their
kids and they haven’t forgotten me. Just
knowing I’ve helped someone do some-
thing with their lives, that means more
to me than any accolade.”Anne-Marie Hutchinson, OBE, solicitor,
was born on August 1, 1957. She died of
lung cancer on October 2, 2020, aged 63Beneath her irreverent,
bolshy manner was an
uncynical sense of justice
Istvan Rabovsky
Hungarian ballet dancer who, with his wife, was
among the first high-profile defectors to the West
Istvan Rabovsky and his wife, Nora
Kovach, two brilliant young Hungari-
an dancers with the Budapest State
Ballet, had been selected to perform at
a gala performance in East Berlin in