1. What is the title, rank and position of the Legal Adviser?

The office of the Legal Adviser to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was created in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Legal Adviser is the head of the Legal Directorate and ranks as a Director General.

2. What are the principal functions of the OLA?

The Legal Directorate includes lawyers; specialists in ocean policy, treaty policy and procedures, litigation management, and knowledge and information management; office managers; and executive assistants.

The principal functions of the FCDO Legal Directorate are as follows:
• Advice: providing legal advice to Ministers and officials on the full range of matters dealt with by the FCDO. This includes matters not just of public international law, but also European Union law and the UK’s relations with the European Union, human rights law, constitutional and public law, the law relating to the British overseas territories, development law, and other areas of domestic law (including for example freedom of information, data protection, commercial and contractual matters).
• Litigation: advising on litigation against the Government in domestic courts, with support from litigation management specialists, and acting as agent for the Government before international tribunals (including the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and inter-State arbitrations).
• Legislation: drafting secondary legislation in areas of the FCDO’s responsibility and working closely with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel (a team of specialist primary legislation drafters in the Cabinet Office) on any primary legislation within the responsibility of the FCDO.
• Policy: providing policy advice to Ministers in the areas of ocean policy and treaty policy.
• Treaties: providing support on treaty procedures across Government.
• International Meetings: Frequently attending conferences, negotiations and meetings both in the UK and abroad as head or members of the UK delegation.

3. Please give a brief description of staff employed by the OLA, including overseas staff. What is the distribution of posts between men and women within the OLA and what category of staff do they respectively belong to?

There are currently approximately 120 staff in the Legal Directorate, about 80 of whom are lawyers working in London. All lawyers are qualified as barristers or solicitors in the UK, and most have post-qualification experience in private practice, in other Government departments or in international institutions.

FCDO posts have the following legal positions:

• UK Mission to the UN in New York - 3 lawyers
• UK Mission to the UN in Geneva - 3 lawyers
• UK Mission to the EU (Brussels) - 4 lawyers
• British Embassy in The Hague - 1 lawyer
• UK Delegation to the Council of Europe, Strasbourg - 1 lawyer
• British Embassy in Washington – 1 lawyer

In addition, lawyers from the FCDO are seconded to the Attorney General’s Office and other secondments take place from time to time.

There are four grades for lawyers within the Legal Directorate: the Legal Adviser (Director General); Legal Directors; Legal Counsellors (also known as Deputy Directors); and Assistant Legal Advisers (split into two different grades).

Numbers of women and men employed in the Legal Directorate in London (as of March 2023) are:

Role: Women / Men
Legal Adviser: 1 / -
Legal Director: 2 (in a job share) / 3
Legal Counsellor: 5 / 4
Assistant Legal Adviser: 38 / 31
Other roles (e.g. ocean policy; treaty, litigation and knowledge and information specialists; business management): 20 / 16
Totals: 66 / 54

4. Are there any specific recruitment and promotion policies, provisions and/or quotas to ensure non-discrimination and equal opportunities, e.g. for the underrepresented sex, for persons with disabilities or for persons belonging to ethnic or religious minorities or of immigrant origin?

All staff are recruited and promoted in accordance with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s policy of making all appointments by merit through open and fair competition, in strict accordance with the key recruitment principles of the Civil Service Commission (see the useful link).

A person's gender, marriage, colour, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin, disability, age or sexual orientation cannot be taken into account when recruiting or promoting; nor can an applicant be chosen from a particular group for reasons of diversity balance. However, the FCDO encourages applications from all suitably qualified candidates regardless of their background or circumstances and also participates in the UK Government’s Disability Confident Scheme.

5. Is OLA staff trained on gender equality issues and are these issues mainstreamed into the OLA’s work?

All FCDO staff are required to take part in training on diversity and inclusion, which covers issues of gender, race, age, religion/belief, disability and sexual orientation..

Legal Directorate has a Diversity Champion or Champions who work to improve the way diversity is addressed within the Directorate. This includes conducting surveys to identify key diversity and inclusion priorities for staff, producing a Directorate wide action plan to take these forward and organising presentations and discussions targeted at specific diversity issues.

6. Briefly describe the organisation and structure of the OLA.

The Legal Directorate is headed by the Legal Adviser and five Legal Directors (two of whom are in a job share). The Directorate Management Committee consists of representatives from each team and meets once a month.

Lawyers based in London are organized into teams, each of which is assigned a number of “client” departments within the FCDO. At present there are nine teams dealing with: Development, Corporate and Operations; Europe and Human Rights; EU Trade and Relations; Foreign Relations; National Security; Northern Ireland Protocol; Ocean and Overseas Territories; Sanctions and Asia Pacific; and Treaties, Economic and Knowledge. Whilst there are some areas in which certain lawyers may specialise, for example EU relations or international human rights law, all lawyers are expected to be able to take on a variety of work and to move between teams at different times in their careers.

As well as legally qualified staff, the Legal Directorate also has a range of other FCDO specialists, career diplomats or home civil servants. Some are attached to the teams of lawyers and others work in the following teams:
• Ocean Policy Unit (part of the Ocean and Overseas Territories Team) – responsible for government policy on ocean issues, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
• Treaty Policy Team (part of the Treaty, Economic and Knowledge Team) – responsible for the UK’s treaty policy.
• Treaty Section (part of the Treaty, Economic and Knowledge Team) – responsible for the UK’s treaty practice and procedures, including publication of treaties before parliament, and performs depositary functions in respect of those multilateral treaties for which the UK is the depositary.
• Knowledge and Learning Team (part of the Treaty, Economic and Knowledge Team) – provides a legal information and enquiry service to Legal Directorate and the wider FCDO, and leads on the Directorate’s knowledge management strategy.
• Central Litigation Unit – provides support in managing domestic and international litigation affecting the FCDO.
• Business Management Team – manages the Directorate’s financial resources and administration.
• The Legal Adviser’s Private Office – provides support to the Legal Adviser.

7. What is the OLA’s place within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

The head of the Legal Directorate ranks as a Director General (i.e. reports directly to the Permanent Under-Secretary.) Assistant Legal Advisers are appointed at close to the top of the Delegated Grade structure of the FCDO, equating to the rank of First Secretary. Legal Counsellors (also known as Deputy Directors) and Legal Directors form part of the Senior Civil Service.

Legal Directorate runs the Law Faculty which is part of the International Academy of the FCDO. The aim of the Law Faculty is to increase awareness of legal issues and it organises a training programme for lawyers in the Directorate as well as for lawyers and policy colleagues across the FCDO and wider UK Government departments. The training programme covers full range of substantive areas of law (eg human rights, law of the sea, law on the use of force, and the overseas territories); legal processes and procedures (eg handling litigation); treaty practice; and working with Legal Directorate.

8. What are the main contacts of the OLA within Government?

As well as providing legal advice within the FCDO, the Legal Directorate is the main centre of expertise on public international law within Government, and is often consulted by other Government Departments when international law issues arise. Thus, for example, all treaties which the UK enters into (with a few exceptions, such as double taxation agreements) have to be cleared by the FCDO.

Legal Directorate lawyers act as agents on behalf of the Government in most international judicial proceedings. This includes cases before the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, as well as international arbitration.

The Attorney General is the chief legal adviser to the Government and has a number of independent public interest functions. As the Government’s principal legal adviser, the Attorney General advises on questions of international law and is involved in the legal aspects of all major international litigation involving the Government, as well as domestic legislation. Departmental lawyers seek the advice of the Attorney General and the Attorney General’s Law Officers (the Solicitor General and Advocate General for Scotland) on various questions of international law of general importance to the Government as a whole. The Attorney General’s Office has a specialist team of international lawyers including secondees from the FCDO Legal Directorate who support the Attorney in delivering that advice.

FCDO Legal Directorate is an associate member of the Government Legal Profession (GLP) and has close links with it and the Government Legal Department (GLD). For example, lawyers frequently move between the GLP/GLD and the FCDO on secondment. Training on a range of issues is organised jointly with GLP/GLD colleagues.

9. Please describe the relations of the OLA with lawyers in private practice, academics and legal institutions.

A key part of the Legal Directorate’s role is to work with non-governmental international lawyers in the UK in order to increase awareness of each other’s areas of work and expertise and enhance the rule of law internationally. FCDO Legal Directorate has traditionally been a part of an active public international law community in the UK, comprising lawyers from the public service and private practice as well as academic lawyers.
Among other outreach activities, FCDO Legal Directorate’s Director General is chair of the Steering Committee for the London Conference on International Law. This Committee is composed of legal practitioners academics and lawyers from other non governmental organisations. The Directorate played a key role in the 1st and 2nd London Conferences, which took place in 2019 and 2022, and the Steering Committee is now working towards the next Conference in 2024.

The Directorate also hosts regular seminars at the FCDO to discuss topical issues in international law to which international law academics and practitioners are invited.
Lawyers in the Directorate are also encouraged to participate in conferences, meetings of learned societies (such as the American Society of International Law, the International Law Association and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law) and to write articles or books for publication. Other activities include visits to universities to speak to students about the work of the FCDO and the organisation of government-wide seminars and training courses.

The FCDO retains lawyers from private practice where the need arises. In litigation and arbitration it is usual to instruct outside counsel for their advice and advocacy.

10. Please provide a brief bibliography on the OLA, if available.

There is a considerable literature on the role of FCDO Legal Advisers, including:

Sir Franklin Berman: “The Role of the International Lawyer in the Making of Foreign Policy”, (in C.Wickremasinghe (ed.), The International Lawyer as Practitioner, BIICL 2000)

F.D. Berman: “The International Lawyer Inside and Outside Foreign Ministries” (in C.Hill and P. Beschoff (eds,) Two Worlds of International Relations – Academics, Practitioners and the Trade in Ideas, Routledge, 1994)

Daniel Bethlehem: “The Secret Life of International Law”; Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law 2012, 1(1), 23-36

Stephen Bouwhuis: “The Role of an International Legal Adviser to Government”; International and Comparative Law Quarterly 2012, 61(4), 939-960

Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice and Sir Francis Vallat: “Sir (William) Eric Beckett, KCMG, QC (1896-1966) – An Appreciation”; International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1968, 17 (2), 267-326

J-P. Gauci and K. Jones: “Conference Report: The Role of Legal Advisers in International Law” (in A. Zidar and J-P. Gauci (eds.), The Role of Legal Advisers in International Law, Brill, 2016)

Sir Iain MacLeod: “The FCO Legal Advisers and Contemporary Challenges” (in A. Zidar and J-P. Gauci (eds.), The Role of Legal Advisers in International Law, Brill, 2016)

Dr. Clive Parry: “Background paper on National Organization and Procedures - United Kingdom” (in H.C.L. Merrillat (ed.), Legal Advisers and Foreign Affairs, Oceana, 1964)

Sir Ian Sinclair: “The Practice of International Law: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office” (in Bin Cheng (ed.), International Law Teaching and Practice, Stevens, 1982).

Brian Simpson: “The Rule of Law in International Affairs” (2003) Vol.125 Proceedings of the British Academy, 211-263

Sir Arthur Watts: “International Law and International Relations: UK Practice”; European Journal of International Law 1991, 2(1), 157-164

Michael C. Wood: “The Role of Legal Advisers at Permanent Mission to the United Nations”, (in C.Wickremasinghe (ed.), The International Lawyer as Practitioner, BIICL, 2000)

Michael Wood: “The Perspective of a Foreign Ministry Legal Adviser” (in M. Evans (ed.), International Law, 2nd edition, OUP, 2006)