Garden Court Chambers is very proud to announce that Dexter Dias KC has been appointed as a High Court Judge.
Dexter will begin sitting in the King’s Bench Division as The Honourable Mr Justice Dexter Dias from 1 October 2024.
Dexter has been associated with Garden Court since his pupillage here in 1988, becoming a tenant in 1989. He began representing Anti-Apartheid activists and poll tax demonstrators, while also protecting members of minority communities from institutional violence and racism, frequently exposing serious misconduct and corruption.
He has appeared in some of the landmark death in state custody cases, representing (often pro bono in the early days) the families of people who have died in suspicious circumstances in prisons, police stations, and mental health settings. As a result of representing the mother of 15 year-old Gareth Myatt, then the youngest person to die in custody in the UK, Dexter took a sabbatical to find ways to better prevent the use of state coercive force on children and make the voice of the child heard.
Dexter was awarded a research scholarship at Harvard and achieved the highest mark in his postgraduate degree at Cambridge University, winning departmental and college prizes and scholarships, with the focus of his work constantly being how to more effectively promote equality and social justice. To that end, he was instrumental in the legislative changes that produced greater safeguarding against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the Serious Crime Act 2015, being the originator and chief author of the Bar Human Rights Committee report that was accepted by the Home Affairs Select Committee and contributed to FGM Protection Orders becoming law.
He brought his Harvard and Cambridge research together in the internationally published bestselling book The Ten Types of Human (Penguin Random House). He has been a Human Rights Adviser to UNICEF UK and inaugural Chair of the Global Media Campaign to End FGM, resulting in the endorsement of FGM in the East Kenya region to fall from 89% to 5%. He has conducted pro bono work across four continents, with particular emphasis on safeguarding women and children.
In tandem with his practice in public law, murder, and terrorism cases, Dexter saw sitting judicially as another way to promote a fairer society. He was appointed Recorder in 2012, was authorised to sit at the Old Bailey in 2017, as a Judge of the High Court (section 9(1)) in 2019, and was appointed as a Deputy High Court Judge in 2021, where he has regularly sat in the Administrative Court, the Family Division and the King’s Bench Division more widely.
Dexter’s official swearing-in by Dame Sue Carr, the first Lady Chief Justice, will be at 5pm on Wednesday 16 October 2024.
We hope that many of his colleagues and friends will attend Court 4, at the Royal Courts of Justice, for the ceremony, where our pupil from the 1980s officially becomes Mr Justice Dexter Dias.
We wish Dexter all the best in his new full-time role as a High Court Judge.
View the official appointment announcement here.
