SCOTLAND’S most influential lawyer greets me in the refulgent, black designer suit that’s become his trademark. Aamer Anwar admits that bespoke labelled suits are one of his personal weaknesses, but they’ve also become a curse.

“People see you in a smart suit and think you’re raking it in and that you’re bleeding the legal aid system dry, but if you want to find out how much I’m making from legal aid, just go on the legal aid board register and you’ll see how little is being made for a firm with 19 employees.”

The case that first brought him to prominence was the murder of Surjit Singh Chhokar in 1998 in North Lanarkshire. It followed what was to become a familiar pattern of lies, cover-up, delay and character assassination. After 14 years, two trials and an inquiry deemed “not fit for purpose” the reform of the double jeopardy principle allowed the case to be reopened.

The Crown set aside the original acquittals of three men and at a subsequent re-trial Ronnie Coulter was handed a life sentence for the murder. After it, the Crown Office acknowledged the courage of the Chhokar family and the role of their lawyer in their long campaign.

Anwar has attracted sharp criticism from various judges and members of the legal establishment for overstepping the mark by indulging in political grandstanding. He might argue though, that in the Chhokar case he and the family had to shout very loudly over a period of many years eventually to be heard. In the case of Sheku Bayoh, who died in police custody, it took seven years for an inquiry to happen.

He says that 70% of his work is pro-bono. So why do you do that much, I ask.

“It’s simple,” he says. “We’ve got the Human Rights Act, but who’s going to give a damn about an employer or a police officer or an institution abusing a person’s human rights on the basis of race or gender or sexuality if there are no lawyers in place to be able to challenge it and no funding?

“We’ve decimated our legal aid system. It’s simply not viable for firms across Scotland to take up these cases. People go on a merry-go-round of contacting lawyer after lawyer after lawyer because they’ve been discriminated against and then having to go to the Law Society and finding it impossible to find anyone who will take their case.”

His highest profile cases all point to a legal system that makes it difficult for black or Asian and socially vulnerable people to secure justice. Yet, he chafes at being called 'a human rights lawyer'.

“For most of my career I’ve been called 'the race row lawyer' but this angers me. I’ve trained as a criminal lawyer, and human rights and equality is all part and parcel of that.

"It’s inferred that the only people I represent are members of the Asian and black communities, but the majority of my clients have been white. For me, human rights are embedded in criminal defence, but you don’t really get taught much about human rights at law school, unless you go looking for it.

“People come to my firm and say: ‘I want to be a human rights lawyer’. But I tell them first to get down and dirty and take legal aid cases and get into the courtroom to deal with people who are among the most vulnerable in society; and some of the most despised: people with addiction problems; people from minority backgrounds.”

You’ll have seen Aamer Anwar on television in the course of a human rights trial or calling for an inquiry, declaiming loudly from courtroom steps while a broken family huddles in the background. His critics dismiss him as a self-publicist with a chip on his shoulder.

A gilded chain of professional awards, though, would indicate otherwise: Solicitor of the Year by The Herald; Lawyer of the Year in the Scottish Legal Awards; a professional excellence award in “recognition of his outstanding achievements and the huge impact his work has had UK wide”. And in 2008, Rector of Glasgow University.

His career-long advocacy on behalf of minorities has its roots in an incident in 1991 in Glasgow’s West End where he was assaulted by police officers. As a student leader he’d staged an occupation of the office of the principal of Glasgow University in protest at racism in the Glasgow Dental School.

He says: “They followed me down to Ashton Lane and knocked some of my teeth out, telling me that this was what happened to uppity Asian boys.”

After four years he was awarded £4200 in damages. The sheriff agreed that he’d been the victim of a racially motivated attack. It was almost worth it though. His protest led to the introduction of anonymous marking across all university faculties.

Police wrongdoing (actual and alleged) figures in several of his most high-profile cases. They follow that depressingly familiar pattern: lies, cover-up, delay, obfuscation.

“It’s not just the police,” he says, “but the Crown Office and institutions of justice like the prison service. Two weeks ago, along with the families of Katie Allan and William Lindsay who are seeking answers as to why their children committed suicide at Polmont Young Offenders Institution, we were told to accept that Crown immunity applies to the Scottish Prison service.

“It’s almost like a licence to kill and they’ll always get away with it. That’s why people encounter arrogance when they deal with the police. You have people who are grieving being forced to set up a campaign simply to get answers. Then they meet a wall of silence and arrogance.

“The institutions know there’s no legal aid for it and no funding. What lawyer is going to carry on fighting that case? What family wants to go through all that? But these families get up every morning in their grief and refuse to give up.”

He harbours a measure of hope, though. “At the start of the Sheku Bayoh Inquiry, Iain Livingstone, Police Scotland’s Chief Constable, said that it wasn’t good enough for the police simply to be non-racist, that they must be an anti-racist force.”

The problem, though, is in reforming a 400-year-old system so that victims of institutional injustice – especially racial – can get access to quick justice.

“In 2022 we have zero black judges; we have zero black senior officers; we have zero black prosecutors. And now people think because we’ve got one or two Asians in the system that we’ve reached a racial Xanadu.

“I wouldn’t be able to work in a private practice because I wouldn’t be allowed to do a lot of this work. That’s why I had to go out on my own; so that I wouldn’t have to compromise.

“What gives me hope was what happened in Kenmure Street [in Glasgow's Pollokshields] last year when ordinary people came out to prevent a Home Office detention. They did what no one else had previously done in the whole of the UK and it created a ripple effect: in Peckham in London and even in Edinburgh.

“And I think we now have the best hope the Crown Office has ever had in our Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, who was my senior counsel for five years for Bayou, and all pro-bono.

"There are individuals now in place who genuinely do care, but the problem lies in the 400-year-old machinery of our system. People still can’t grasp what institutional racism is. It’s an all-white judging panel at professional awards ceremonies. Do we simply not exist?”

“After Black Lives Matter we had the banners, the hashtags, and everyone thinks it’s ‘job done’. But where are they now?

"Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman and Priti Patel. We’ve still got the scar of Dungavel [the Immigration Removal Centre in South Lanarkshire]. It was supposed to be torn down years ago.

“Kenmure Street was amazing but these dawn raids happen every day of the week and some poor person is treated like an illegal human being – there’s no such thing under international law. Where’s the continuing response?”