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Magna Carta & the First Race Relations EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL? MAGNA CARTA & THE FIRST RACE RELATIONS ACT Wednesday 29th July 2015 Achieving racial equality in the 21st Century W: www.runnymedetrust.org T: @runnymedetrust #runnymedeRRA50 EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL? MAGNA CARTA & THE FIRST RACE RELATIONS ACT P A N E L ONE: L E G A L H ISTORY O F EQUAL RIGHTS IN THE UK The Honourable Mr Justice Singh: What do the Magna Carta and the Race Relations Act mean to us today? Sir Rabinder Singh is a Justice of the High Court, assigned to the Queen’s Bench Division. He was appointed in 2011 and is currently one of the Presiding Judges of the South Eastern Circuit. After his legal studies in Britain and the USA he was a lecturer in law at the University of Nottingham from 1986 to 1988. He was called to the Bar in 1989 and became a QC in 2002. He was a Deputy High Court Judge from 2003 and a Recorder of the Crown Court from 2004. He has held visiting posts at Queen Mary London and the London School of Economics. He is currently an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. His publications include The Future of Human Rights in the UK (1997) and (as co-author with Sir Jack Beatson and others) Human Rights: Judicial Enforcement in the UK (2008). Geoffrey Bindman QC: The Race Relations Acts: the early days Geoffrey founded Bindmans LLP in 1974 and throughout his long and distinguished legal career, has specialised in civil liberty and human rights issues. From 1966-1976 he was legal adviser to the Race Relations Board and thereafter until 1983 to the Commission for Racial Equality. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at University College London and at London South Bank University, an Honorary Fellow in Civil Legal Process at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies. In 1982 he was Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles. In July 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University. He also has an honorary doctorate from Kingston University, and has been chair of the Board of Trustees at the British Institute of Human Rights He was knighted in January 2007 for services to human rights and in March 2011 appointed honorary Queen's Counsel. Colm O’Cinneide: Equality: A Constitutional Right? Colm O’Cinneide is a Reader in Law, specialising in human rights, comparative constitutional and anti- discrimination law. He is also currently General Rapporteur of the European Committee of Social Rights (having served as Vice-President of the Committee from 2008-12) and a member of the Blackstone Chambers Academic Panel. Colm has acted as a legal consultant for a range of organisations, including the European Commission, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, and has also served as specialist legal adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the UK Parliament (2007-10). He is a member of the editorial boards of Current Legal Problems, the International Journal of Law in Context, Race and Social Problems and the Irish Jurist, among other W: www.runnymedetrust.org T: @runnymedetrust #runnymedeRRA50 publications: he has also acted as an assessor for the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and as external examiner for a range of institutions. Barbara Cohen - Chair Barbara is a discrimination law consultant. Over the past seven years she has been concerned with the development and implementation of anti-discrimination law and practice in the UK and other EU Member States. In the UK she has been involved in a range of projects for public authorities and voluntary organisations intended to give full effect to anti-discrimination laws and the public sector equality duties. Previously Barbara was head of legal policy at the Commission for Racial Equality for Great Britain. She has also been a principal solicitor for a London local authority, worked in a legal aid practice and for the National Council of Civil Liberties (now Liberty). She is currently vice chair of the Discrimination Law Association. P A N E L T W O : POLICY AND ITS IMPLE MENTATION IN THE ENA C T M E N T OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR A L L Will Pettigrew: ‘The use of the Magna Carta in the anti-slavery debate’ Educated at Oxford and Yale, Will joined the School of History at Kent in September 2009. Before that he was Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has written on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and on the history of trading companies. His 2013 monograph history of the Royal African Company, Freedom's Debt [10] won the Jamestown Prize. He is the lead investigator on a five-year Leverhulme Trust project [11] that focusses on trading corporations as constitutional bridges between cultures. He is Director of the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce [12], which he founded at Kent in 2013. Baroness Usha Prashar – ‘The policy and politics of the 1965 and 1976 Race Relations Act’ Baroness Prashar has led a number of public and voluntary organisations with great distinction. Since 2012 she has been Deputy Chair of the British Council. In July 2009 she was appointed a member of the Iraq Inquiry. From 2005 to 2010 Baroness Prashar was Chairman of the Judicial Appointments Commission. Baroness Prashar is Governor of the Ditchley Foundation, a Trustee of Cumberland Lodge, President of the UK Council for International Student Affairs, President of the National Literacy Trust, President of the Community Foundation Network and Patron of the Runnymede Trust. From 2000 to 2005 she was the First Civil Service Commissioner. She has served as Chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales, Director of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations,President of the Royal Commonwealth Society and Director of the Runnymede Trust. Her past appointments have also included: Board member and Chancellor of De Montfort University, Chairman of the National Literacy Trust, and Governor of Salzburg Global Seminar. She served as a W: www.runnymedetrust.org T: @runnymedetrust #runnymedeRRA50 member of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct, the Arts Council and as a non-executive director of ITV and Channel 4. Baroness Prashar was born in Kenya. She attended the Universities of Leeds and Glasgow. In recognition of her contribution to public life she was awarded a CBE in 1994 and given a peerage in 1999. She sits in the House of Lords as a Crossbencher. Callton Young OBE Callton Young is a former Senior Civil Servant. He has an honours degree in politics. During a 35 year career he undertook a wide variety of roles ranging from Private Secretary to Minister of State Baroness Trumpington, to being a member of the Cabinet Ad-Hoc Group on BSE. In particular, Callton headed the Parliamentary Bill Team at the Home Office tasked with amending the Race Relations Act 1976 to apply anti-discrimination laws to policing as recommended by the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. He was instrumental in the Bill going much further, not least through its enforceable duty on public bodies to promote race equality and avoid discrimination. Jack Straw in his memoirs ‘Last Man Standing’ described the resultant legislation as the ‘most far-reaching measures better to secure racial equality, and sanction racial discrimination, anywhere in the Western world.’ Callton took voluntary early retirement in 2011 and is currently Chairman of Croydon African Caribbean Family Organisation UK. Claire Alexander - Chair Claire is Professor of Sociology at The University of Manchester . She has researched and written on race, ethnicity and identity in Britain for over 20 years. Her main publications are The Art of Being Black (1996) and The Asian Gang (2000). Her latest publication, The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration (with Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais) will be published in December 2015. Claire is Editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. She was a Trustee at Runnymede from 2005-2015 and is Co-Chair of the Runnymede Academic Forum. PANEL THREE: THE ROLE OF ACTIVISM IN THE ADVA NCEMENT OF EQUAL RIGHTS Malcolm Chase: ‘The Chartists: activists for civil rights’ Malcolm Chase is Professor of History at the University of Leeds where he teaches modern British history, including the history of trade unionism, environmentalism and of autobiographical writing. His books include Chartism: A New History (2007; French edition 2013) and most recently a collection of essays, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (2015). He has advised the Parliamentary Art Collection on the commemoration of Chartism at Westminster; and in 2013 he was invited to give a lecture at Parliament to mark the 175th anniversary of the People’s Charter. Before joining the Leeds School of History, Malcolm had worked for over twenty years in adult education, initially running an adult education centre on Teesside, and later as the head of the University's School of Continuing Education. He is a former chair of the UK Social History Society and the Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Labour History. W: www.runnymedetrust.org T: @runnymedetrust #runnymedeRRA50 Gus John: ‘The role of activism in the 1965 and 1976 Race Relations Act’ Professor Gus John was born in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean in 1945 and has lived in the UK since 1964. He is an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the Institute of Education, University of London, and Director of Gus John Consultancy Limited. He has worked internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant since the 1990s.
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