David Ballantyne

Mr Ballantyne’s experience is mainly in government legal work, having been the Attorney General in three separate countries: Tuvalu 1988-91, Turks & Caicos Islands 1992-98 and the Cayman Islands 1998-2003.

He became a legal adviser in 2003-04 at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, returning there from 2006-2010 as a legal consultant and then a senior legal consultant.

As a chief law officer, he dealt with constitutional and international issues. In Tuvalu, the reception of imperial laws was held to be ultra vires the constitution in a case he stated. He stopped the fraudulent printing of flawed Tuvalu stamps by litigation in London. By conducting a training needs analysis for 10 island states he devised a “learning by doing” programme for the South Pacific in his report Continuing Legal Education in the Pacific, adopted by the Pacific Islands Law Officers Meeting in 1991.

In Turks and Caicos, he introduced a Legal Profession law and a Proceeds of Crime law. In Cayman, he dealt with the OECD and FATF tax haven initiatives. With the OECD he developed a model treaty on which he based the UK/Cayman/USA Tax Information Exchange Agreement signed at Washington DC in 2001.

He reformed Cayman’s anti-money laundering regime, and argued successfully in the Cayman Court of Appeal that a judicial fetter on the prosecution of a bank for money laundering was invalid under the Constitution. In 2005 as an expert accredited to the IMF he assisted in drafting model anti-money laundering laws.

He engaged in maritime boundary negotiation for Tuvalu (with Fiji and France), for Turks & Caicos (Bahamas), and for Cayman (with Cuba, Jamaica, and Honduras), resolving the Cayman/Honduras delimitation by an adjusted median line. In Tuvalu, he agreed fisheries access with Japan, and air services with Fiji and the Marshall Islands. During the 1994 Haitian refugee crisis he negotiated with the US their proposal for a safe haven on Grand Turk, and later with Haiti an agreement to legalise or repatriate migrants.

At the FCO he drafted UN, EU and UK sanctions, pioneering maritime interdiction on the high seas for sanction breaches, with human rights safeguards. He also advised on overseas territories, on human resources including duty of care in hostile environments, and for DfID and DECC on HMG’s aid framework and climate change MOUs with the IMF and the World Bank.

He intends to concentrate on constitutional and public law.