When the rule of law breaks down and art emerges

There are moments in history when law goes quiet.

Not because it has nothing to say but because it has lost the courage, the imagination or the power to speak.

There are moments when institutions continue to stand, but their moral authority has already collapsed. Their procedures remain. Their language continues. Yet justice, that fragile promise, begins to recede.

It is in those moments that art becomes necessary.

Art is not an optional flourish applied once civil society is secure. Art’s very being is born of freedom. Art is the barometer of our civilisation. It is our reflection and reckoning. It is the tribunal before which law is ultimately judged.

And when law fails, morally, structurally, violently, art emerges as law’s final tribunal.

When the structures break

On the front line for justice, an exhibition by the Law Society, showcases what happens when legal structures break down.

This multimedia exhibition, featuring documentation, film and artworks, shines a light on the resistance and resilience of lawyers facing extraordinary challenges. It showcases the work of lawyers worldwide who bravely fight for justice at great personal risk.

It is about the lawyers who have suffered, whose rights have failed to be protected, who have worked tirelessly in pursuit of truth and justice and suffered immeasurable hardship for simply doing their jobs.

Some have lost their livelihoods, others their freedom, and some their lives.

It is shocking.

And it leaves one with a renewed respect for the role of lawyers in society, for their commitment to clients, to truth and to law, even in the face of terrible sanction.

Two hundred and thirty eight

Two Hundred and Thirty Eight, 2021 is a work, created by three artists, Judd Moses Druce, Kay Parker and Caroline Wright, in response to the life of Kurdish Turkish human rights lawyer Ebru Timtik.

Timtik was one of 18 lawyers from the Progressive Lawyers Association and the People's Law Bureau who were arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned for representing clients critical of the Turkish government.

For example, they represented the victims and families of the 2014 Soma Holding Eynez coal mine disaster, where 301 miners died and a further 162 were injured.

Timtik was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison, while her colleague Aytaç Ünsal received a 10-year sentence for alleged terror-related offences.

Milena Buyum (Amnesty International), called the convictions "a travesty of justice", demonstrating yet again "the inability of courts crippled under political pressure to deliver a fair trial."

Timtik began a hunger strike to protest her denial of a fair trial. She died after 238 days, weighing only 30 kilograms.

Her death signals the "death of humanity, justice and conscience", mourned Turkish musician Zülfü Livaneli.

Two Hundred and Thirty Eight, 2021 presents a gentle stitchwork blanket together with an interpretive sound piece. It has been created within a structure formed of Timtik’s life and her struggle for justice, realised visually and in sound as two interlinking elements.

Delicate. Understated.

And devastating.

A blanket is an object of comfort and security, precisely what Timtik was denied from her imprisonment until her death. But it is also a covering and shelter offering protection. The most ordinary object, made sacred by need. It embodies heritage. Each stitch is a memory: passed down, worn thin with history, softened by survival. A blanket can also become a burial cover.

Two Hundred and Thirty Eight, 2021 was created for the inaugural International Fair Trial Day in 2021, observed every year on 14 June – but it does not feel like commemoration. It feels like proximity. Like touching something that should never have happened. The blanket becomes a metaphor for repression itself: a blanket of silence.

Timtik’s life, denied, constrained, punished, is transformed through this work into painful stitches, throbbing notes.

Each stitch, the memory of her body slowly breaking and fading, her heartbeat becoming faint. A life reduced to the smallest measurable units, like an overlooked ECG printout, a record of rhythm and struggle, incongruent, discordant.

Here art does not merely remember Timtik. It makes her absence present.

The quiet champions of the rule of law

Societies rely on the rule of law to uphold the checks and balances of good government, to prevent institutional corruption and overreach. In advanced western democracies we often take these institutions for granted. Or worse, we neglect them because they function quietly, routinely, almost invisibly.

Yet legal systems do not run on paper alone. They run on people.

And the day-to-day guardians of the legal system are lawyers.

Lawyers are the quiet custodians of justice. The work is rarely glamorous. They sit in police stations, courtrooms, boardrooms and detention centres. They defend homes, livelihoods, children, reputations and sometimes lives. They work in regulatory investigations and tribunals, act as special rapporteurs, and conduct diplomacy and treaty negotiation.

They defend the right to free speech, the right to a fair trial, the right to be protected from government overreach. Rarely does one significant life event pass without the involvement of a lawyer.

Lawyers are not merely service providers. Their role is crucial in the justice systems of all democracies.

They are often described as “friends of the court”, not because their role is to flatter the system, but because their ultimate duty is to assist the court in arriving at fair, just and lawful outcomes that treat every human being as equal before the law. They are officers of the legal system, entrusted with upholding the rule of law itself.

Their heroism is subtle. Not because it lacks significance, but because it requires discipline. Their work must be conducted under strict rules of client confidentiality. Respect for the judiciary and the profession demands their restraint.

When lawyers are threatened, law itself is threatened

The works in this exhibition bring us into dramatic encounter with the struggle of lawyers across the globe.

The exhibition also highlights the work being done by the Law Society’s Lawyers at Risk programme to support lawyers and human rights defenders who are hindered in carrying out their professional duties.

It is precisely because the work lawyers perform is both essential and, at times, perilously critical of power that lawyers are recognised as having special rights and protections at law.

In 1990, the United Nations adopted the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, requiring nations to:

• permit lawyers to perform their duties without intimidation, harassment, or improper interference
• respect the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications
• grant lawyers immunity for statements made in good faith during legal proceedings
• provide lawyers with timely access to necessary files and documents
• allow lawyers to form self-governing bodies to represent interests and promote integrity

Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees all people the right to legal assistance, reinforcing the importance of the lawyer’s role in ensuring fair trials.

More recently, in March 2025, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention for the Protection of the Profession of Lawyer.

The convention addresses:

• entitlement to practise
• professional rights
• freedom of expression
• professional discipline, and
• specific protective measures for lawyers and professional associations

Despite these declarations, global institutions often stand powerless as nations violate treaties, borders and human rights. Their inability to enforce collective will becomes an open invitation to those who believe force, not law, is the ultimate arbiter.

And so we return to the question: what remains, when law fails?

Art is what escapes law. When law fails, morally, structurally, violently, art erupts, because the human need to speak, imagine, mourn, rage and reimagine reality cannot be regulated into silence.

Like the stitches in Two Hundred and Thirty Eight, 2021, art erupts in the gap between law and justice.

The works in this exhibition, intimate as they may be, testify to the work of lawyers and to what happens when law fails to restrain power.

They leave me wondering:

Does art erupt because law fails — or does law fail because it cannot contain what art reveals?