Practice Areas
Sasha is a specialist in public law, human rights and discrimination law. She has experience of conducting high-profile judicial review claims across a wide range of subject areas including migrant rights, discrimination and equality duties, healthcare, housing and community care.
Sasha has been described in the Chambers Directory as “fantastic, very responsive … incredible … relentless and never gives up, and no problem is too small for her to deal with”. The Legal 500 Directory describes her as “an exceptional solicitor, with extensive experience in housing, public law and migrant support. She is equally at home achieving important results for individuals and bringing important strategic challenges ”.
Migrant Rights
Sasha’s migrant rights work encompasses: securing life-saving hospital treatment for foreign nationals; successfully challenging unlawful decisions to refuse to allow former Afghan interpreters for the British army and their families entry to the UK; challenging decisions to detain and remove victims of trafficking to Rwanda; testing the amount of additional support provided to pregnant women living in and outside of hotels; obtaining accommodation for homeless families from social services under the Children Act; getting accommodation for people with care needs arising from physical disabilities or poor mental health under the Care Act; ensuring care leavers are properly supported and accommodated; getting people suitable Home Office accommodation; and challenging the Home Office’s failure to monitor its multi million pound contracts on asylum support and accommodation.
Sasha has represented clients who were successful in getting the Home Office to change its policies on protecting people from abuse who live in asylum support accommodation and dealing with urgent applications from destitute people for schedule 10 accommodation. She has also represented clients who successfully challenged the Home Office’s failure to have a lawful system in place to provide disabled people with suitable asylum support accommodation and prevented the Home Office from evicting thousands of people from asylum support accommodation during the pandemic.
Discrimination and Equality
Outside the field of migrant support, Sasha has been successful in challenging consultations and equality impact assessments where proposals would greatly affect large groups of people. She also uses the public sector equality duty to challenge decisions. These cases have included: Lambeth council agreeing to reinstate the full benefits of the Taxicard scheme to their residents; NHS Haringey carrying out an equality impact assessment in relation to the interpreting services it provides to patients at GP surgeries; a major NHS Trust withdrawing its decision to close all of its specialist mental health support services; the Home Office discontinuing with its “Go home or get arrested” advertising campaign; and forcing local authorities to rethink strip club licensing decisions.
She is also instructed by the Official Solicitor on behalf of a young woman whose prolific and life-threatening self-harming in prison custody has led to an Article 2 investigation commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, and by a client challenging the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s decision not to uphold her complaint against the police when she was being unlawfully evicted by her landlord.
Career
Sasha joined Deighton Pierce Glynn in 2008 and qualified as a solicitor in 2012. She has been a partner since 2020 and is Head of the Migrant Rights Department. Prior to joining Deighton Pierce Glynn she worked at a law centre, the Citizens Advice Bureau and a refugee mental health advice centre.
