The amazing life of the man charged with the protection of women in Wales
Nazir Afzal has been beaten black and blue countless times and witnessed his cousin die in his arms as a child. He nursed that burning sense of injustice as a top lawyer and rose to national prominence with one of the UK’s highest-profile prosecutions. La
THE man in charge of protecting women in Wales is under no illusion that Wales may somehow have “a vaccine against serious crime”. Whether it be modern slavery in any one of its myriad forms – forced labour, forced marriage or being forced into organised crime – it’s undoubtedly happening right now in Cardiff, Swansea or north Wales as we speak.
“You name it, it’s happening,” said Nazir Afzal, the Welsh Government’s national advisor on violence against women.
Nazir is a man whose eight-year-old cousin died in his arms as a child, who brought down the Rochdale paedophile ring and whose outspoken views on Ghislaine Maxwell have marked him out as an advocate for women’s rights. If anyone knows what it’s like to live a life of persecution and disadvantage, then Nazir does.
The fourth of seven children, he was born in Birmingham in 1962 – a long way from his family’s home in a village in Pakistan. Growing up in Small Heath in the city in the 1960s and 1970s, he was subjected to bullying and racism in its rawest form. Early on, Nazir learned that he was not only different but positively unwanted.
“Whenever I played rugby the moment I got the ball somebody would shout, ‘Get the P**i’,” he told Lauren Laverne on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in what became the most listened to episode of 2021.
The family originated from Saleh Khana on the northwestern border of Pakistan. Nazir spent one memorable summer holiday there as an eightyear-old playing in the shadows of the Cherat mountains and swimming beneath the blisteringly hot sun. In contrast, inner-city Birmingham was full of teenage racists who’d beat Nazir on his way home from school.
“I was sort of an immigrant – my family came to this country with literally nothing,” he said. “I was beaten black and blue several times. That’s an existence that makes you think, well, ‘Why? Why am I being treated that way?’ And it makes you firstly appreciate the safe loving environment of the family home, which it was. But it also made me understand what it feels like to be a victim. To not be listened to, to not be heard.”
One day, while patching his wounds from his latest kicking, his father turned to the 13-year-old Nazir and said: “The police are not interested in you. They don’t care about us. Justice doesn’t mean anything to us. Just make sure you don’t walk home alone from school next time. Stay one step ahead of them, right? Because there is no justice.”
Nazir has no doubt that that sentiment played a significant part in him pursuing a legal career. Not only that, but also the opportunity to focus on those areas of crime which weren’t on the radar of the authorities at the time.
He’s telling me his life story over a video call from his home in Manchester in a precious 45-minute slot which has been allocated weeks beforehand. He talks fluently and conversationally with a disarming directness – he has no time for trying to make things sound nice for my benefit. Every so often he adds my name at the beginning of a sentence, which creates even more immediacy to his words.
“My life is a series of 45-minute chunks,” said Nazir, the former Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) chief solicitor. There’s been someone before me and there’ll be somebody straight after too, he says unapologetically. It’s clear I’m on a timer.
He’s wearing a white designer T-shirt with Givenchy across his chest and there are photographs of his kids perched on the windowsill behind him. He’s tucked away in the corner of a room in his home – an unremarkable place to conduct his remarkable work. The normality of this scene is a stark contrast to the subject matter the conversation focuses on. It is one that gets starker and starker as he relates his early life and career.
“Every single thing I do is all about trying to make a difference,” he said, talking 19 to the dozen while staring directly through the screen. “I found a long time ago that the only way you make a difference is by doing things differently.
“Time and time again people think, ‘Let’s get whatever it is out of a filing cabinet and follow the process’, but that will always give you the same outcome as you’ve had before. And I wasn’t interested in that.”
For someone who confesses to working 20 hours a day and survives on just four hours sleep, where on earth does that capacity to empathise come from? I need to understand he’s a man who’s suffered more loss than many, he said. The sense of injustice is palpable even through the screen.
“When my eight-year-old cousin died in my arms and I’m eight and I’m carrying that girl in my arms for four hours on a ferry,” he said. “When my uncle was murdered by the IRA when I was 12 years old. When my brother’s nephew was stabbed several times and his head was stamped on.
“When I’m beaten black and blue on more occasions than I care to remember. It’s the point
My family came to this country with literally nothing. I was beaten black and blue several times. That’s an existence that makes you think, well, ‘Why? Why am I being treated that way?’
where you don’t really care what people are going to do to you. I’m literally immune to it in that respect.
“Some people use the word resilience. People ask, ‘How are you so resilient?’ I have no idea what the answer to that question is other than I am what I am. I’m driven. Absolutely. I’m driven.”
The death of his cousin, Yasmin, is one he’s come back to time and time again in interviews to the press and in his book, The Prosecutor, published in 2020. During that family trip back to Pakistan in the summer, Yasmin fell ill on the return leg of the journey. Despite being just a few hours from Ostend, she died from acute dehydration. Nazir cradled her body in his arms on the ferry crossing until officials at Dover carried her away. It was a needless death brought about by lack of medication.
It’s undoubtedly been the driving force of his career. After finishing school, Nazir headed to the University of Birmingham and attended law school in Guildford. His first job was as defence solicitor at a firm in Birmingham, but his conscience struggled with defence work at times.
He quit after being asked to represent an obviously guilty rapist. He felt he could do more good as a prosecutor.
In 1991 he started a temporary contract at the Westminster branch of the CPS. It would be an exceptional two-decade career in London – working with Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit and on the murder of Samaira Nazir, a young woman who was a victim of an honour killing and heading the first-ever prosecution of a husband whose callous and controlling behaviour had driven his wife, Gurjit Dhaliwal, to suicide.
In 2001 he was appointed assistant chief crown prosecutor for London. He was 38 – the youngest ever in the job and the first Muslim to hold the role. In 2005 he was awarded an OBE and, in 2011, keen to leave the capital for a quieter life, he took a job in Manchester as the chief prosecutor in northwest England.
He gives a powerful example of how that heavy sense of justice has followed him throughout his career – in the late 1990s he was prosecuting parents for sexual abuse of their child. As part of trial preparations he had to watch the evidence
– some of which included the father raping the 18-month old baby which was being filmed by the mother.
Nazir said: “Then I go home and I’ve got an 18-month-old baby of my own and I hug her and think, ‘Well, actually, I don’t have a job anymore. This is a mission. This is more than a job. I’ve got to ensure that nobody suffers like that and that those people are brought to justice’.
“That’s what drives me – that nobody should be like her, nobody should be like the victims that I write about in my book and the tens of thousands of others that have trusted me with their stories.”
Nazir really came into the public eye as the man who brought about the downfall of the Rochdale paedophile ring in 2012. His new-found public profile from that case was an unwanted result of simply doing what he thought was the right thing, he said. Overnight he became the leading expert in children’s sex abuse, but he wasn’t more qualified than anybody else. He just listened to the victims. In fact listening is all it really takes, he said.
“I’m not an expert in anything – the only people who are experts are people who have been impacted by a crime or a behaviour,” he explained earnestly. “So if a survivor knows what went wrong they know how it could be put right. And all I did was listen to them and amplify their voices and then put that in the right places with the Home Office or in government or wherever.”
He’s talking generally, but the Rochdale gang showed the gaping holes in dealing with victims of sexual abuse. In 2008 a 15-year-old girl told police that she had been repeatedly raped by a gang in Rochdale. The local CPS decided she was not credible.