Human rights lawyer behind the Race Relations Act
Anthony Lester, who has died aged 84, was the “godfather” of much of Britain’s human rights, equality and free speech legislation, said The Times. He played a pivotal role in bringing in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976; he championed civil partnerships in 2004, and spent 30 years campaigning for Britain to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. Lester’s career in the upper house ended in 2018, however, when he was accused by an author and women’s rights campaigner of having offered her a peerage in exchange for sexual favours 12 years earlier. He vehemently denied the charge, but resigned anyway, saying he wasn’t well enough to fight his corner.
Anthony Lester was born in London in 1936, the grandchild of Jewish refugees, and the eldest son of Harry and Kate Lester, a barrister and a milliner respectively. He attended City of London School, and served in the Royal Artillery during his National Service. When he refused to list his religion as Church of England, he was barred from an officers’ dance, said The Daily Telegraph. At Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history and law, he campaigned for the dismissal of careers service staff who had made anti-Semitic comments about people who were “short and Jewish with wet palms”. After graduating in 1960, Lester studied for a masters at Harvard. In the US, he wrote a report for Amnesty about civil rights in the South, and after being called to the Bar, he established his chambers as a leading set for human rights cases. “I went to the Bar partly because my father said I would be absolutely hopeless as a barrister,” he told The Jewish Chronicle. “I don’t think it occurred to him that there was a way to use law as an instrument of social change.”
In the 1960s, Lester developed a simple test for discrimination, said The Guardian. He would fire off identical job applications, one under the name Smith, one Singh. Mr Singh, he said, was rarely called in for an interview. In 1964, he helped found the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination. Having tried to become a Labour MP in 1966, he served as a special adviser to Roy Jenkins at the Home Office, and in 1968, he used a Fabian Society lecture to make his first call for human rights legislation. He followed Jenkins to the SDP, then joined the Lib Dems. It was Paddy Ashdown who nominated him for a peerage. Ashdown had found him to be a wise adviser. He was also seen as a “brave lawyer”. He could, colleagues said, be “pernickety and grumpy, but he was always prepared to stick his neck out in the interests of furthering the pursuit of equality”. In 1971, he married Catherine Wassey, a fellow barrister. She survives him, along with their two children.