Shami Chakrabarti

Shami Chakrabarti (Baroness Chakrabarti CBE PC) is a human rights lawyer and campaigner, Labour Peer and was Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales from September 2016 to April 2020.

She was the Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), from 2003 to 2016 and its In House Counsel from 2001 to 2003. Prior to that she was at the bar and then a Home Office lawyer (1996–2001).

She was a panellist on the Leveson Inquiry into media culture, ethics and practice after the phone-hacking scandal in 2011/12 and one of an international group who carried the Olympic flag at the opening of the London games in 2012.

She was the Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and the University of Essex and has been an Honorary Professor at the Universities of Bristol and Manchester and the London School of Economics. She served on the Board of the British Film Institute (BFI) for many years and on the Members Council of the Tate. She is a Master of the Bench of Middle Temple. She has written and broadcast widely and is the author of two books, On Liberty (2014) and Of Women (2017). Both are published by Penguin, Allen Lane.