Queen Mary human rights law expert, Merris Amos, will sit on the panel of the event 'Imran Khan: Does Britain Need Europe's Human Rights Laws?' on Tuesday 31 January. The event is hosted by the New Turn Society at Queen Mary.
Imran Khan is one of the leading human rights and criminal lawyers in Europe. His career began representing Stephen Lawrence, the British teenager stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack in 1993, and his work on the case led to the establishment of the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry, which in 1999 highlighted serious flaws in the police's handling of the case and declared the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist.
Mr Khan's speech will be followed by a discussion by panel of experts and those at the forefront of the field:
Francesca Klug is a Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE and Director of the Human Rights Futures Project. Francesca was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Incorporation Project at King’s College Law School where she assisted the government in devising the model for incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law reflected in the Human Rights Act.
From 2006-09 Francesca was a Commissioner on the statutory Equality and Human Rights Commission. She is a frequent broadcaster and has written widely on human rights, including Values for a Godless Age: the story of the UK Bill of Rights (Penguin, 2000). Francesca’s column for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, ‘Blogging the Bill of Rights’, was published as a booklet by Liberty in June 2010. Francesca was awarded the Bernard Crick prize for the best article published by Political Quarterly in 2009 at the annual George Orwell Prize event in May 2010. Francesca was subsequently appointed as a member of the Political Quarterly Editorial Board. She co-edited a Special Issue of the European Human Rights Law Review, published in December 2010, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Human Rights Act.
Anthony Speaight QC is a self-employed barrister at 4 Pump Court, Temple, and a member of the independent Commission on a Bill of Rights, set up by the Government in March 2011 to investigate the creation of alternative human rights legislation specific to the United Kingdom. He has a varied civil practice, including professional negligence, construction and regulatory work which has involved cases considering the impact of the Human Rights Act on professional discipline and financial regulation.
A lecturer at Queen Mary, she has previously held posts at the University of Westminster and the University of Essex where she was the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Centre. Prior to this she was an adviser to Lord Lester QC and an adviser to the Australian Commissioner for Racial Discrimination. Her main area of research is the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 and she has published a major book on this subject, Human Rights Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006). She has also published a number of articles and chapters concerning the protection of human rights at the national level and she is the editor of Human Rights Law Reports – UK Cases. In addition to her teaching and research, she has designed a number of human rights training courses and presently conducts human rights training for central and local government, as well as the private and charitable sectors.