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 Bindman & Partners, 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 and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, the Helen Bamber Foundation, and the One World Trust.

Read more about Geoffrey and his firm Bindman & Partners.

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.

Parosha Chandran (Vice Chair)

Parosha Chandran is a human rights barrister practising from chambers at 1 Pump Court in London. She has worked at the European Commission for Human Rights (Strasbourg), the UNHCR (London) and the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (The Hague). She has extensive experience in lecturing and is the author of A Guide to the Human Rights Act 1998 (Butterworths, 1999). She is a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Pro Bono Lawyers Panel and a member of the legal team of the Kurdish Human Rights Project.

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.

Sandy Ruxton

Sandy Ruxton is an independent policy advisor and researcher, specialising in poverty, equalities and human rights issues. His most recent post was Policy and Communications Manager with the UK Poverty Programme at Oxfam, where he worked from 1998-2007. Prior to this he worked at childcare charity NCH, and the Prison Reform Trust. He is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Child, the Family and the Law at Liverpool University, and an Associate of the Research Unit on Men and Masculinities at Bradford University. Recent publications include: Developing Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - A framework for UK NGOs (Oxfam/JUSTICE, 2002) (with R. Karim); Gender Equality and Men: Learning from Practice (Oxfam, 2004); What about us? Children's rights in the European Union (European Children's Network, 2006); and Working With Older Men (Age Concern, 2006).

Veena Vasista

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.

Alan Wardle

Alan Wardle is Programme Director for Public Affairs at the Local Government Association. He has been at the LGA since November 2007, and heads up their public affairs work. 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.

Patti Whaley (Treasurer)

Patti is Director of Resources and Company Secretary for Forum for the Future, a charity specialising in sustainable development. From 1990 to 2001, Patti worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, initially as Director of Information Technology and subsequently as Deputy Secretary General. Prior to joining Amnesty International, she was a systems consultant and project manager for Price Waterhouse in Washington, D.C. She is also Treasurer of the Sea of Faith Network UK.