Eleanor Mitchell

Eleanor joined Matrix in 2016. Her practice focuses on public law, human rights and equality law.

She regularly provides advice and representation across areas including immigration (asylum and protection appeals, unlawful detention claims, claims on behalf of victims of trafficking, and wider policy challenges); education (including both applications for judicial review and appeals relating to all aspects of Education Health and Care Plans); equality and discrimination; community care; and prison law (including challenges to categorisation/classification decisions and matters involving prisoners’ rights).

Eleanor has been instructed in matters at all levels up to the Supreme Court, and appears regularly in the Court of Appeal, the High Court (led and unled), the Upper Tribunal, and the First-tier Tribunal, as well as before the Parole Board and administrative bodies such as Independent Review Panels.

Eleanor also has specialist knowledge and experience of international human rights and humanitarian law. She advises non-government organisations on legal aspects of their advocacy and policy work, and has been involved in applications and interventions before both the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

Recent cases

Eleanor’s recent cases include:

• R (Bloomsbury Institute Ltd) v Office for Students [2020] EWCA Civ 1074 – challenge to the Office for Students’ approach to the regulation of higher education institutions.
• R (Humnynstkyi) v SSHD [2020] EWHC 1912 (Admin) – challenge to the Secretary of State’s policy framework for allocating Schedule 10 bail accommodation.
• R (CRA & ors) v Lord Chancellor – a challenge to hasty changes to the Legal Aid scheme governing statutory immigration appeals to the First-tier Tribunal, resulting in an acknowledgement that the changes had been unlawfully made and the introduction of hourly rates pending further consultation.
• Konevod v SSWP [2020] EWCA Civ 809 – appeal as to the proper construction of EU law governing the “export” of social security benefits.
• MS (Pakistan) v SSHD [2020] 1 WLR 1373 – intervention for ECPAT UK in relation to the role of Article 4 ECHR in statutory protection appeals.
• R (DN (Rwanda)) v SSHD [2020] AC 698 – intervention for Bail for Immigration Detainees in relation to sequential decision-making in the context of immigration detention.
• Kalma v African Minerals Ltd [2020] EWCA Civ 144 – appeal concerning corporate liability in tort for alleged involvement in police violence.
• Secretary of State for the Home Department v JS (Uganda) [2020] 1 WLR 43 – appeal concerning the UK’s international legal obligations to “family reunion” refugees.
• R (TM (Kenya)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] 4 WLR 109 – challenge to the legal and policy framework governing the use of segregation in immigration detention.
• R (Duncan Lewis (Solicitors) Ltd) v Director of Legal Aid Casework – challenge to the Legal Aid Agency’s refusal to backdate grants of funding, resulting in the introduction of new provisions to allow for backdating.

Eleanor is admitted to practice as a barrister and solicitor in Australia (since 2011), where she has worked both as a solicitor in Ashurst Australia’s litigation team and as a judicial assistant at the Federal Court of Australia. A fluent French speaker, Eleanor has also spent a year with the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva – where she worked on cutting-edge issues in the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law – and has interned at the Legal Division of the World Food Programme in Rome and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Eleanor holds a Bachelor of Civil Law (Dist.) and a Master of Philosophy in Law (Dist.) from the University of Oxford. She was awarded the Sir Robert Menzies Memorial Scholarship in Law to undertake the BCL and the Law Foundation of South Australia Fellowship to undertake her MPhil.

Privacy Notice

Eleanor is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. In order to provide legal services to her clients, including advice and representation services, Eleanor needs to collect and hold personal data. This includes her clients’ personal data and the personal data of others who feature in the matters in respect of which she is instructed. To read Eleanor’s privacy notice in full, please see here.

Eleanor is regulated by the Bar Standards Board and accepts instructions under Standard Contractual Terms. To find out more information on the way we work at Matrix, including our fee transparency statement, please see our see our service standards.