Sir Jonathan Mark Swift (born 11 September 1964) is a British High Court judge.

Early life and education

Swift was born in

Rochford Rochford is a town and civil parish in the Rochford (district), Rochford District in Essex, England, north of Southend-on-Sea, from London and from Chelmsford. At the 2011 census, the Civil parishes in England, civil parish had a population ...

, England and educated at Southend High School for Boys. He studied at

New College, Oxford New College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1379 by Bishop William of Wykeham in conjunction with Winchester College as New College's feeder school, New College was one of the first col ...

and completed a BA in 1987. He followed this with an

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

Emmanuel College, Cambridge Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mo ...

in 1988. He was

called to the bar The call to the bar is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received "call to ...

Inner Temple The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, commonly known as the Inner Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court and is a professional association for barristers and judges. To be called to the Bar and practice as a barrister in England and Wa ...

in 1989 and practised from 11 King's Bench Walk. He was First Treasury Counsel from 2007 to 2014 and

took silk A King's Counsel ( post-nominal initials KC) is a senior lawyer appointed by the monarch (or their viceregal representative) of some Commonwealth realms as a "Counsel learned in the law". When the reigning monarch is a woman, the title is Qu ...

in 2010. He served as a recorder from 2010 to 2018 and was appointed deputy High Court judge in 2016.

High Court career

On 1 October 2018, Swift was appointed a High Court judge, and assigned to the

Queen's Bench Division The King's Bench Division (or Queen's Bench Division when the monarch is female) of the High Court of Justice deals with a wide range of common law cases and has supervisory responsibility over certain lower courts. It hears appeals on point ...

. He took the customary

knighthood A knight is a person granted an honorary title of a knighthood by a head of state (including the pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church, or the country, especially in a military capacity. The concept of a knighthood ...

in the same year. Since 2020, he has been judge in charge of the

Administrative Court An administrative court is a type of specialized court on administrative law, particularly disputes concerning the exercise of public power. Their role is to ascertain that official acts are consistent with the law. Such courts are usually co ...

. On 10 June 2022, Swift ruled in favour of the

UK Government His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central government, central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

that the deportation flights of unsuccessful asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda should be allowed to proceed, as there was material public interest in doing so. He added in his ruling that the risk posed to refugees was "in the realms of speculation". On 8 June 2023, Swift ruled in favour of the UK Government, and rejected the appeal of political prisoner

Julian Assange Julian Paul Assange ( ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of News leak, leaks from Chels ...

's legal team, which had filed two appeals before the court against then UK Home Secretary

Priti Patel Dame Priti Sushil Patel (born 29 March 1972) is a British politician who has served as Shadow Foreign Secretary since November 2024, having previously served as Home Secretary from 2019 to 2022. A member of the Conservative Party, she was Secr ...

's decision to extradite

Wikileaks WikiLeaks () is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by ...

founder being indicted by the United States under the Espionage Act.

Personal life

In 2008, he married barrister Helen Evans with whom he has a son and a daughter.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Swift, Jonathan Living people 1964 births 21st-century English judges Knights Bachelor Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge Alumni of New College, Oxford Members of the Inner Temple People educated at Southend High School for Boys Queen's Bench Division judges English King's Counsel 21st-century King's Counsel