BIHR Trustees

Our board of trustees is responsible for the strategic direction of BIHR and has ultimate legal responsibility for our activities. It meets quarterly and appointment of new trustees is by an open recruitment process.

Brief biographies of all our trustees are below.

Sir Geoffrey Bindman (Chair)

Geoffrey Bindman has practised as a solicitor in London since 1960. He is a consultant at Bindmans LLP, which he founded in 1974.

He was Legal Adviser to the Race Relations Board from 1965 to 1976 and thereafter to the Commission for Racial Equality until 1983. He has conducted many leading cases in the fields of civil liberties and human rights. In 1999 he received the Liberty and Law Society's Gazette award for lifetime human rights achievement and in 2003 the Gazette Centenary award for human rights. He is a visiting professor of law at University College London and London South Bank University. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by De Montfort and Kingston universities. He is honorary president of the Discrimination Law Association, Vice-President of the One World Trust and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust and the Helen Bamber Foundation. He was knighted in 2007 for services to human rights.

Read more about Geoffrey and his firm Bindman & Partners.

Veena Vasista (Vice Chair)

Veena has worked on equality and human rights issues in a range of sectors: think tanks, voluntary and community organisations, private employers, and government. She has worked to support NGOs in both the UK and US to use international human rights standards and institutions to strengthen their work and raise the profile of racism as a violation of human rights. She was an appointed member of the UK Government Task Force on Human Rights, set up to advise on implementation of the Human Rights Act. She currently is on the National Advisory Panel for Impetus: shared values in action, a citizenship and human rights awards scheme for schools and youth organisations in the U.K.

Peter Carter QC

Peter Carter QC is a barrister at 18 Red Lion Court chambers whose practice is principally in criminal law. He is the past Chairman of the Bar Human Rights Committee and a member of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies. In addition to his practice in the UK, he undertakes pro bono work on behalf of death row prisoners overseas, appearing in the Privy Council, preparing submissions to international tribunals and amicus briefs in US courts and elsewhere. In recent years he has spent an increasing amount of time conducting seminars and addressing international bodies on human rights aspects of domestic and international criminal law.

Tanuka Loha

Tanuka Loha has worked for many years with communities seeking to claim, preserve or advance their human rights. She now predominantly effects change at a strategic level – in recent years as executive director of a rights-based NGO and as a member of the senior management team of the UK government’s transition programme establishing the Equality and Human Rights Commission. During Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign, Tanuka worked at the Pennsylvania political HQ on voter protection and constituency issues; managing the state-wide public advice-line as one of three PA election law specialists in the run-up to and on election day. She is currently working with the international NGO sector and as special advisor on external affairs and development to Aastha, an education charity near Kolkata, India. Tanuka studied philosophy at UCL, has a Masters in Race and Ethnicity and is a barrister.

 

Dr Jacqueline Morris

Dr Jackie Morris qualified as a doctor in 1971 and was appointed a Consultant Physician to St Mary's Hospital in 1979 specialising in Geriatric Medicine. She is an Honorary Consultant Physician at University College Hospital London having worked as a Consultant at The Royal Free Hospital NHS Trust Hampstead and St Mary's Hospital Paddington until 2006 developing comprehensive services for older people. She was Frohlich Visiting Professor to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1986. She was seconded to the Department of Health Policy Division as a Senior Medical Advisor on Older People between 1992-1994. She was Chair of Age Concern London between1994-1997 and President of the Royal Society Medicine Section of Geriatrics and Gerontology between 1996-1998. She is President of the Central London Branch of the Parkinson's disease Society.As Chair of the British Geriatrics Society's (BGS) Policy Committee, 2005-2007, she developed a successful multi-agency campaign on Dignity Behind Closed Doors which she still leads. She is also working with the National Council for Palliative Care on the care of older frail people with multiple co-morbidities. She collaborated with Age Concern on their Hungry to be Heard Campaign. She edited the BGS Policy Compendium between 2005-2007. She is working with the Institute of Actuaries on research into causes of mortality in old age.

Sonny Taank

Sonny is currently VP, HR Business Partner for Global Transaction Services at Citigroup and prior to that he was VP, Employee Relations. His previous posts include Head of Employee Relations at BT Openreach and Head of Private Sector at the Commission for Racial Equality as well as management posts in a variety of retail organisations. Sonny was also a Trustee of the young people’s charity, Catch 22.

 

Dorothy Thomas

Dorothy Q. Thomas is a 2008-2010 research associate at the Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy at the School for Oriental and African Studies. From September 2007-August 2008, she was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is a 1998 Macarthur Fellow and a 1995 Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 1998 she received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton. Until January 2007, Thomas was senior program advisor to the U.S. Human Rights Fund, a collaborative grant making initiative that supports domestic human rights work in the United States. From 1990 – 1998, she served as the founding director of the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Division. She is a member of the Board of the British Institute for Human Rights and the Ms. Foundation for Women, and sits on the advisory boards of the ACLU Human Rights Project, the American Constitution Society’s Human Rights Working Group, and the Human Rights Watch U.S. Program. Thomas writes and speaks frequently on human rights, including most recently “Against American Supremacy: Rebuilding a Culture of Respect for Human Rights in the United States,” in Bringing Human Rights Home, Praeger, (2008), “Ain’t I American?: Women’s Rights, Human Rights and US Identity in the 21st Century,” The Helen Pond McIntyre Lecture, Barnard College, October 30, 2007, and “Are Americans Human?: An Ex-Pat’s Guide to Progressive Politics in the United States,” the Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights, the University of Connecticut, October 22, 2009. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

 

Alan Wardle

Alan Wardle is Head of Health Promotion at the Terrence Higgins Trust. He was previously at the LGA, heading up their public affairs work from 2007 - 10. Before that he was Director for Parliamentary and Public Affairs at Stonewall for four and a half years. While there he led Stonewall's lobbying and campaigning work, including on the Civil Partnership Act, and established their policy and research function. Before that Alan was in the civil service, doing various policy, finance and private office jobs in the Department for Work and Pensions. Alan studied law, including international and domestic human rights, at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge.