Personal life

Meling is married and have four children. He usually votes for the Conservative Party

Conservative Party of Norway

The Conservative Party is a Norwegian political party. The current leader is Erna Solberg. The party was since the 1920s consistently the second largest party in Norway, but has been surpassed by the growth of the Progress Party in the late 1990s and 2000s...

, but voted blank in 2003 as a result of the party joining the other parties in demanding to repatriate Mullah Krekar. He was a Salvation Army

Salvation Army

The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....

 soldier until 2003 when he withdrew to not become a burden for the organisation as a result of his work as a lawyer, defending controversial figures.

Career

He became famous overnight after being appointed as the public defender

Public defender

The term public defender is primarily used to refer to a criminal defense lawyer appointed to represent people charged with a crime but who cannot afford to hire an attorney in the United States and Brazil. The term is also applied to some ombudsman offices, for example in Jamaica, and is one way...

 of the Islamist terrorist Mullah Krekar

Mullah Krekar

Mullah Krekar , is a Kurdish Sunni Islamist terrorist who came to Norway as a refugee from northern Iraq in 1991. His wife and four children have Norwegian citizenship, but not Krekar himself. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Norwegian and English...

, and has since also worked on a number of other high profile cases, mainly cases directly targeted against Norwegian commercial and political interests. He is noted for especially defending immigrants and Muslim

Muslim

A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

s suspected for various criminal offences.

Some of his other more famous cases include:

• Mohammed Shah Rais (also known as "The bookseller of Kabul"), who is planning to sue Åsne Seierstad
  Åsne Seierstad
  Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian freelance journalist and writer, best known for her accounts of everyday life in war zones - most notably Kabul after 2001, Baghdad in 2003 and the ruined Grozny in 2006.-Personal and professional life:...
  
   for defamation of character in her book The Bookseller of Kabul
  The Bookseller of Kabul
  The Bookseller of Kabul is a non-fiction book written by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, about a bookseller, Shah Muhammad Rais , and his family in Kabul, Afghanistan...
  
  (ISBN 0-316-73450-0) which she wrote after staying with his family in Kabul
  Kabul
  Kabul , spelt Caubul in some classic literatures, is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. It is also the capital of the Kabul Province, located in the eastern section of Afghanistan...
  
   for several months.
• Osman Omar Osman, a Kurd
  Kurdish people
  The Kurdish people, or Kurds , are an Iranian people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey...
  
   with dual Norwegian and Iraq
  Iraq
  Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
  
  i citizenship. He is accused of killing his Norwegian wife while on vacation in Iraq, and was sentenced to death by hanging on March 10, 2005 by a local Iraqi court. The sentence was however annulled due to "wrongful application of the law", and a new trial before the same court was scheduled for August 10, 2005. After several delays the trial was finally held, and on October 10, 2005 he was again sentenced to death. According to a spokesman for the Norwegian Department of Foreign Affairs, the judge in the case has assured them that the sentence will most likely be converted to life imprisonment by a higher court, and that the death sentence would not be carried out in any case. Meling has been Osman's appointed lawyer in Norway, however he has not been directly involved in the case other than consulting with Osman's Iraqi lawyer and petitioning the Norwegian and Iraqi governments to have the case transferred to a Norwegian court since the victim and accused were both Norwegian citizens. However, since Osman was also an Iraqi citizen this was denied.

Controversy

Meling's choice of clients has made him an unpopular man in many circles. Meling has received a steady stream of hate mail, ranging from neatly hand-written letters filled with Bible quotes that wish him a happy journey to hell to old ladies walking up to him to tell him he ought to be ashamed.

In 2004 a dying man who had been a long time supporter of the Salvation Army contacted the local Salvation Army branch in Bergen and informed them that he had changed his will

Will (law)

A will or testament is a legal declaration by which a person, the testator, names one or more persons to manage his/her estate and provides for the transfer of his/her property at death...

 to exclude the organisation after learning that Meling was a member. He had previously intended to leave 1 million NOK

Norwegian krone

The krone is the currency of Norway and its dependent territories. The plural form is kroner . It is subdivided into 100 øre. The ISO 4217 code is NOK, although the common local abbreviation is kr. The name translates into English as "crown"...

 to the local branch and an unspecified amount for the Salvation Army's work abroad. Meling had in fact resigned from the Salvation Army about 6 months earlier in 2003 to avoid being a liability to the organisation, but he still listed as a member in early 2004 due to slow internal bureaucracy. When questioned about the incident Meling said he was "saddened" that people would punish a volunteer organisation he had been a member of because of his work as a lawyer.

After presenting a bill for 1,000 hours (for a total amount of 956,000 NOK / 116,000 Euro) to the government for his public defence of mullah Krekar, he has also been accused of being greedy. According to Norwegian law all asylum seekers

Refugee

A refugee is a person who outside her country of origin or habitual residence because she has suffered persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or because she is a member of a persecuted 'social group'. Such a person may be referred to as an 'asylum seeker' until...

are entitled to a certain number of hours of lawyer assistance, but the government felt that his claim was excessive and refused to pay for more than 80 hours. Meling insists all the billed hours were necessary to provide a fair trial for his client, considering the vast amount of evidence presented by various intelligence agencies (some of which had been thrown out of court upon closer examination), and the fact that the case had become highly political.