Denis Nowell Pritt, QC (22 September 1887 – 23 May 1972) was a British barrister and left-wing Labour Party politician.
[3] He was educated at Winchester College, which he left after four years so as to relocate to Geneva in order to learn French, with a view to joining his father's company.
[3] Following his time in Switzerland, Pritt moved again to expand his linguistic knowledge, working in a bank in A Coruña, Spain, and improving his Spanish.
He wrote an account of this, The Zinoviev Trial, which largely supported Joseph Stalin and his first purge of the Communist Party.
In 1931, Pritt represented three Indian revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru before the Privy Council, arguing that the ordinance which had been used to establish a special tribunal to try them for the crime of murdering a policeman was ultra vires.
[9] Pritt successfully defended Ho Chi Minh in 1931 against a French request for his extradition from Hong Kong.
In 1942, he initially defended Gordon Cummins but, due to a technicality, the trial was abandoned and restarted with a new jury, and Pritt was replaced by another lawyer.
In this case, Pritt worked with a team of African, Indian and Afro-Caribbean lawyers including Achhroo Ram Kapila, H. O. Davies, Dudley Thompson and Fitz Remedios Santana de Souza.
[5] Pritt was said to have encouraged Billy Strachan, a fellow communist activist and one of the pioneers of black civil rights in Britain, to study law.
[12] Strachan then went onto be elected the President of Inner London Justices' Clerks' Society, and became an expert in laws regarding adoption, marriage, and drink driving.