THOSE who know Imrana Jalal would say her decision to pursue law was a natural calling, given her resistance to social norms as a child growing up with a staunch Muslim father.
Her turning point, arguably came when she was shaken to the core after a “car accident while still in high school” — when the then principal of St Joseph’s Secondary School called her a “criminal”.
Not one to seek the limelight, Imrana eventually gave in to sharing her life story (after The Fiji Times chased after her for a year!) because she “wanted young women and girls to know what is possible, despite being a woman”.
“There are so many negative images that it’s important to tell the good stories and what is associated with the gift of education and hard work,” she said.
In Imrana’s own words, she was given room to bloom when she joined the Attorney-General’s Office in 1984.
Thrown into the lion’s den, she thrived and took every opportunity to learn and grow in her stride.
Imrana joined the Attorney-General’s Office in 1984 as a junior legal officer.
When she left to pursue a degree in gender studies in Sydney in 1991, she was a principal legal officer.
She shared an anecdote about the life-long friendships developed at the A-G’s Office, including with the late Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi, the highly-respected Bau chief who became a prominent Fijian lawyer, legal scholar, jurist, and former vice-president, and Graham Everett Leung.
Another close friend who joined the Attorney-General’s Office the year after was a well-known lawyer, Jon Apted.
Imrana and Jon had gone through Auckland Law School together.
“In 1984 there was a civil service freeze on hiring, even though there was a shortage of lawyers in government,” Imrana recalled.
“Our then-boss, Solicitor-General Qoriniasi Bale, had to prepare a special Cabinet memo to get three new lawyers confirmed in the AGO in the following order on the memo — Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi, Patricia Imrana Jalal and Ratu Finau Mara.
“Rumour had it that only one person would be supported owing to the freeze on hiring. “Somehow, serendipity got me onto a list with the scions of two aristocratic Fijian families. “Needless to say, we were all three approved.
“Ratu Joni and I would joke about who Qori really wanted. “I still maintain it was me!
“We remained close and Ratu Joni’s death was such a terrible blow to me and our friends. He was brilliant, an intellectual giant really, and so funny, I miss him every day.”
Looking back, Imrana says that being a Crown lawyer in her early 20s was the best possible start to her career, as well as being a steep learning curve.
“Representing the Crown was such a good grounding.
“We were doing high court trials in our first year of practice, while many of my friends and peers in New Zealand were doing basic legal conveyancing and magistrates court work.
“I was privileged to work on some of the big issues of the day, and with some of Fiji’s finest lawyers and judges, and to learn from them.”
A year into her career at the A-G’s Office, Imrana and Jon Apted appeared in a controversial extradition matter, the first of its kind in Fiji, on behalf of the Attorney-Generals of both Fiji and the United States of America.
They were the two most junior officers in the A-G’s Office at the time, but Mr Bale decided they should be given the opportunity to handle the case, recognising that Imrana’s international law Master’s degree might prove useful.
“A Fiji man had raped an American woman in California.
“I will never forget the details of that rape in the survivor’s sworn affidavit, it has shaped my thinking to this day.”
The accused had run away to Fiji and the US Federal A-G had requested the Fiji A-G to extradite the accused to the US.
The accused had hired a senior counsel to fight the extradition.
“Jon and I appeared on behalf of the US A-G and argued the matter.
“This was a really, really big deal.
“The legal arguments were intricate, involving the validity of the extradition treaty entered into by Fiji during the colonial days, among other matters.
“The week of court hearings was challenging, but also exciting.
“I was so glad I had done international law at law school.
“It was a baptism of fire for both Jon and I. Jon was brilliant as usual.
“The accused’s counsel did a decent job but we won the case.
“We delivered the accused into the hands of two US sheriffs who had fl own over to receive the accused.”
In another case presided over by Justice Francis Rooney in the High Court, Ratu Joni and Imrana got a thorough scolding in a very public way for not understanding the rules of procedure.
They had come to court to argue a matter, not realising that they and the A-G’s Office had somehow earlier conceded the matter through an error.
As far as Justice Rooney was concerned, they were there to argue remedies and damages only.
H M Patel Esquire was for the plaintiff.
“But the case, if lost, would have cost the State a lot of money and created a bad precedent for us.
“So Qori told us to get back out there and somehow try to argue the case from the beginning.
“We realised that the most strategic way to argue this was to take the blame fully so that it would not be held against the State.
“We found this dusty old 1837 English case in the law library, in which the British House of Lords had said that “in matters concerning the State a junior counsel’s
blunders should not be held against the State”.
“We put this legal argument to Justice Rooney. I remember standing up to plead the argument before His Lordship, my legs trembling with fear.
Ratu Joni was equally terrified, although he looked characteristically calm.
The judge had the equivalent of a judicial fit on the Bench! He told us we were incompetent (which we likely were) and should not be appearing before him again, as we were both clearly unfit to be Crown lawyers!
“Somehow we won the legal argument.
“Ratu Joni, Justice Rooney and I became close friends after that, and we continued to communicate with him and Amina Rooney in South Africa long after he retired,
until his death. Ratu Joni would write to him the most beautiful letters.
“The message is, I guess, that you learn from your mistake, not your successes.”
Imrana subsequently worked as Public Legal Advisor, the pre-cursor to Legal Aid, but still within the A-G’s Offi ce, as a barrister, mainly in the Domestic Family
Court.
She began representing the poorest of women, and Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre clients who were denied good legal representation because they could not afford it.
She said these groups of women endured triple forms of discrimination,
they were women, poor, many without independent income, and marginalised by the stereotypical patriarchal culture in Fiji.
“That was the steepest learning curve for me.
“Those years in the Family Court gave me the philosophical underpinning to do something that was forming in my brain but had not actually crystallised.
“Over and over in my mind wasthe consistent thought, that it was not enough to represent individual women, as it only helped them.
“What if I could do something to help larger numbers of women by challenging the structural and systemic discrimination women face every day? And how was I going to do that?”
- Tomorrow: Part 6 — Imrana the trailblazer. Together with other driven women set up a civil society organisation to combat sex and gender discrimination.
