Rabinder Singh, a leading Indian-origin lawyer, became the first judge in the UK to wear a turban instead of a wig at a United Kingdom High Court.

Singh, who co-founded the Matrix Human Rights Law Chambers with Cherie Blair, wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, four years ago in 1999, was appointed a deputy (part-time) High Court judge in December.

39-year old Cambridge-educated Rabinder Singh QC, the youngest person to be called to the High Court bench and one of Britain's leading experts in public and administrative law - the law relating to government departments and public authorities – he heard a number of applications at the Royal Courts of Justice in London for permission to challenge immigration decisions.

England's senior judiciary has always been described, as "pale, male and stale" due to the absence of any non-white full-time high court judge. A turban-wearing Sikh Mota Singh served for some years as a circuit judge.

Rabinder Singh, who is in the running to become the first full-time high court judge of Asian extraction, has been one of the leading voices in the debate over the legality of armed intervention in Iraq, having argued in a series of legal opinions that war would be illegal without a fresh resolution from the UN security council and he had also made an unprecedented application last December, on behalf of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for a high court declaration that it would be unlawful for Britain to go to war with Iraq without an explicit UN resolution authorizing it. The court turned it down.

As a barrister, he represented the civil rights organisation Liberty and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in the case the government lost in the appeal court over the refusal of benefits to refugees who fail to claim asylum at the first reasonable opportunity.

Mr. Singh was born in Britain to Sikh immigrants from India. He grew up in a working-class part of Bristol and attended Bristol grammar school. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he earned a double first in law, and then spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became interested in constitutional law and human rights.

Most of his practice involves acting either for or against government departments.

He is a visiting professor at the LSE and until recently held a part-time post as the independent monitor of the entry clearance system, which required him to make random checks on up to 1,000 visa refusals a year.

A spokesman for the Lord Chancellor's Department said: "We are fairly certain it is the first time a judge wearing a turban has sat in the high court. He is also believed to be the youngest."

BACK