Shami Chakrabarti, since 2016 a member of the British House of Lords, was the Director of the civil-liberties and human-rights group Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties) from 2003 until 2016 and thereafter Shadow Attorney General in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Shadow Cabinet. She first joined Liberty as in-house counsel in 2001, and became heavily involved in its engagement with the “War on Terror” and with the defence and promotion of human-rights values in the British Parliament, courts and wider society, being described in The Times as “probably the most effective public affairs lobbyist of the past 20 years”. In 2011 she was appointed a panel member of the Leveson inquiry (a judicial inquiry into phone-hacking) and in 2016 chair of an inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour Party. A barrister by background, she was called to the Bar in 1994 and worked as a lawyer in the Home Office from 1996 until 2001 for governments of both persuasions. Among other positions, she is Chancellor of the University of Essex, a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and a Bencher of the Middle Temple and since 2018 a Privy Counsellor.