by Neil Syson
April 21, 2016
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ONE of Britain’s top human rights lawyers who represented Julian Assange and war criminals has died in an apparent suicide.
Married dad of two John Jones QC, 48, who worked alongside Hollywood actor George Clooney’s wife Amal, passed away on Monday.
He acted for Wikileaks founder Assange, 44, holed-up for four years in the Ecuador Embassy in London, when the Swedish government initially tried to extradite him for questioning on rape charges.
Mr Jones and Amal, colleagues at renowned civil rights legal firm Doughty Street in central London, were currently trying to save the lives of Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif and Libyan spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi.
They had been ordered before a firing squad in Tripoli – but the lawyers were trying to divert their case to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Holland, which does not have the death penalty.
A spokesman for British Transport Police said it was called to West Hampstead rail station in north London at 7.07am on Monday [4/18/16] after a man was struck by a train.
A spokesman added: “He was pronounced dead at the scene. The man’s death is not being treated as suspicious. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”
Mr Jones lived in a £1.5 million home in Hendon, north London, with Slovenian wife Misa Zgonec-Rozej, 40, a director of an international law consultancy, and his two children.
He specialised in extradition, war crimes and counter-terrorism, taking cases from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon and Cambodia.
One of his clients was Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, 65, sentenced to 50 years in a British jail for aiding rebels in Sierra Leone’s civil war in return for “blood diamonds”.
In 2014 Mr Jones campaigned for him to be moved to an African prison so he could be near his family.
The Hague case of Mustafa Badreddine, accused of killing Lebanon’s prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, was temporarily halted on Tuesday to pay tribute to the lawyer who withdrew from representing the defendant in September.
Doughty Street said in a statement: “John was a brilliant and creative lawyer admired and appreciated for his amazing sense of humour, professionalism and deep commitment to justice. His death is a huge loss.”