The barrister wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair will represent a group of Australian Aborigines suing the British government over nuclear testing on their land, a report said yesterday.
Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement spokesman Neil Gillespie said Cherie Blair had been engaged by a group from Emu Field, in Australia’s red desert center, who are seeking compensation over 1953 atomic tests by Britain.
Five cases had been lodged in British courts over illnesses linked to the fallout from two nuclear weapons exploded in the Great Victoria Desert in October 1953.
“She has been recruited not because of her old man, but because she’s one of the leading silks in the UK,” Gillespie told the Australian newspaper. “We’re so pleased, she’s an incredible individual, sharp as a samurai sword.”
The firm Hickman and Rose was acting for the group in London, he said.
More than 100 Australian army veterans or their widows have already joined a class action by British soldiers for radiation exposure during the desert tests, which took place between 1952 and 1967.
The local nomadic Maralinga Tjarutja tribes were rounded up and expelled from the area in trains and trucks ahead of the testing program, but some continued to wander across and camp on contaminated land.
Security at the sites was lax and warning signs were in English and unintelligible to the Aborigines.
Some individuals were compensated following a 1985 Australian government inquiry that heard tribespeople had to walk barefoot across radiation-poisoned land because boots issued to them by the authorities did not fit.
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