TONY ELLIS

The lawyer’s lawyer

Tony Ellis takes the clients that other lawyers don’t want. He sticks up for the rights of thugs and rapists and infuriates middle New Zealand. Murderer and child molester Phillip John Smith’s fight to be able to wear a wig in jail, says Ellis, is about ‘‘fundamental principles of human rights’’.

Ellis’s notorious legal victory allowing compensation for prisoners mistreated in Auckland prison caused uproar in Parliament and many other places.

The politicians changed the law so victims’ families could get some of the prisoners’ money - a move which Ellis calls ‘‘outrageous’’.

Ellis infuriates judges as well as governments and the public. He once told the president of the Court of Appeal he shouldn’t take up his knighthood because it would make him look like a government stooge.

‘‘If I wanted to be loved,’’ Ellis says in his unwavering British monotone, ‘‘I wouldn’t be doing this.’’

Ellis, 65, is short, wide, phlegmatic and focused. During a long interview in his inner-city chambers he doesn’t flinch or raise his voice despite repeated provocations. He’s a lawyer’s lawyer and part of the thrill of human rights cases, he says, is intellectual.

‘‘I was never a brilliant trial lawyer. There are a lot of people who are better with a jury than I am,’’ he says.

‘‘But [with juries] you don’t need to know any law, whereas appeals, you need different skills.’’

The harder the case, the more he likes it. ‘‘I do difficult cases,’’ he explains.

‘‘I’ve got four law degrees from three countries [New Zealand, Australia and Britain] and I like learning ... and what I don’t like doing is the same case that I did last year or the year before.’’

He is a striking mix of legal stickler and liberal agitator. He argues fiercely, for instance, that Smith was illegally deported from Brazil back to New Zealand.

The Brazilian constitution prohibits jail sentences of more than 30 years on human rights grounds. But Smith’s life sentence in New Zealand meant he could be recalled to prison at any time for the rest of his life.

These arguments will strike many as legal sophistry, a mere dodge to allow a dreadful criminal to go free.

‘‘Well, where do you draw the line? I mean Nazi war criminals were grabbed from various places including Brazil by the Israelis. Does that make it right?

‘‘There was no need to kidnap Eichmann. He could have been removed lawfully. I don’t think it shows much respect for the law when you go around kidnapping people.

‘‘Are we going to kidnap the president of Syria? Or the president of North Korea, because it suits us?’’

Prisoners like Smith have rights, he insists.

‘‘It was Churchill, wasn’t it, who said our society is reflected in how we treat our prisoners, and he wasn’t exactly a rabid liberal do-gooder.’’

As a barrister, Ellis says, his duty is to serve the law and not to go on a moral crusade. But he also admits that he might be ‘‘a bit of a moral crusader’’ himself.

He ‘‘gets satisfaction from taking cases for underdogs’’. He has, for instance, taken cases for intellectually handicapped people incapable of arguing for themselves. He has represented men who have spent decades in jail after committing minor sex crimes in their youth.The intellectual barrister is occasionally surprised at the human effect of his arguments. In 2013 he argued that Appeal Court President Mark O’Regan should probably surrender the knighthood he received that year because accepting a government gong put his independence into question. How did that go down? ‘‘Oh, it didn’t go very well … I said ‘I’m not arguing about you personally. The argument is that all judges are compromised by this.’ I don’t think they understood the argument.’’

But did he really expect judges not to be offended by the suggestion that accepting honours made them look like government stooges?

‘‘Well, I expected the judge to react to that in a calm fashion, the point being that this is a point of constitutional principle not a personal attack.’’

He could have taken the case to the Supreme Court, he notes drily, which ‘‘at the time had four or five judges who had knighthoods or a damehood’’. He didn’t. How did the liberal activist lawyer get like this? Did he have high-minded or intellectual parents? Was he from a religious family, perhaps? Or a very political one? ‘‘No ... no ... no.’’ His father was intelligent - an electrical engineer - but not an intellectual.

‘‘We didn’t get on, I can tell you that. I left home at 17.’’

His parents separated when he was five and his father remarried when Ellis was about 12 or 13, to a ‘‘very evangelical’’ woman. Perhaps the difficult relationship with his father encouraged a certain independent attitude towards authority? ‘‘Yes, I think that’s quite plausible.’’ Raised in England’s southeast, Ellis studied commerce at university and only took to the law after he and his wife Jean emigrated to Australia. He became assistant company secretary at the Melbourne Age and had to look at ‘‘the libel suits that came in once a week’’.

This piqued his interest in a specialist area of the law and he did a law degree at Monash. Later he took up a post lecturing in commercial law in New Zealand, moving on to work for a select committee and becoming clerk assistant of Parliament.

After working in SOEs, such as Coalcorp, in 1991 he became a barrister.

A quarter century later the troublemaker has become venerable. Jean, his wife of 40 years and a long-serving computer expert, now runs his office. Their two sons are grown up (businessman Owen lives in Vietnam; Ross is a graphic designer). Ellis is proud of his contribution to the law. He has taken landmark cases, but he’s made himself unpopular with the powerful and knows he won’t be made a Queen’s Counsel any time soon (a couple of his applications have been turned down).

Taking hard cases, some funded only by legal aid, has also cost him a fortune. Recently he has started taking high-paid cases to fatten his retirement fund.

But the hard cases still beckon, as they always have done. He recalls his first case before the Court of Appeal, representing a notorious paedophile recently splashed across the front page of The Evening Post.

‘‘He came in to see me and said: ‘Would you be happy to act for me?’ And I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t be happy to act for you. But I will.’’’

"If I wanted to be loved, I wouldn't be doing this."