Lord Lester of Herne Hill, human rights lawyer who fought discrimination and inequality – obituary

Lord Lester of Herne Hill, who has died aged 84, was as Anthony Lester QC one of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers for almost half a century.

Driven by an intense dislike for discrimination and inequality, he was involved in drafting Britain’s first race relations and sex discrimination legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, and introducing the legislation on civil partnerships in 2004 and the Defamation Act of 2013.

In his busy early years, Lester chaired the legal subcommittee of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, which he helped to form in 1964, and was active in the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Fabians, the Institute of Race Relations and the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants. He was also co-founder, in 1968, of the Runnymede Trust, chairing it in the 1990s.

Though he was active in a host of lawyers’ organisations and pressure groups, Lester was a power in the courtroom. He blocked attempts to stop the press accusing the makers of thalidomide, the morning-sickness medicine that damaged unborn babies, of negligence.

He appeared in such notable cases as that in 1993 when doctors were permitted to stop feeding the Hillsborough disaster victim Tony Bland, who was in a persistent vegetative state, and, three years later, Diane Blood’s successful battle to be allowed to bear her dead husband’s children.

Through his involvement with the Family Planning Association, Lester took up a case in Northern Ireland during which it was claimed that the FPA was trying to liberalise the province’s abortion laws through case law.

His forensic manner could be forceful, and in 1989 he was barred from appearing in Singapore for being “combative and truculent”. He once suggested to Lord Diplock in the judicial committee of the Privy Council that it would be appropriate for the case of a client in Singapore to be heard before he was executed, rather than afterwards.

Lester’s test for discrimination in the 1960s was equally straightforward and – he felt – still applicable half a century later. He would fire off applications to a job advertisement in the name of a Mr Singh and a Mr Smith, enclosing identical CVs, to see which was offered an interview; it was usually Mr Smith.

Created a life peer in 1993, Lester sat in the Lords as a Liberal Democrat, but politically he had started with Labour. He was the party’s candidate for Worthing in 1966, and later a special adviser to Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, helping him push through a wave of social reforms.

Lester moved with Jenkins to the SDP, then to the Lib Dems. Though Gordon Brown brought him into his “Government Of All the Talents” (Goats) as a special adviser to Jack Straw on constitutional reform, he stayed with the Lib Dems beyond his resignation from the Lords in 2018.

He resigned from the Garrick Club in 1995 over its refusal to admit women, and in 2019 left the Lib Dems for the “Independent Group” of pro-EU Tories and Labour MPs who had broken with the party over its failure to tackle anti-Semitism.

Lester was himself Jewish, and throughout his life felt discrimination in all its forms deeply. He reckoned himself a non-believer, and disliked formal religion generally.

His main interest away from the law was painting watercolours, holding an annual exhibition at the family’s summer home in Co Cork.

Anthony Paul Lester was born in London on July 3 1936, the eldest son of Harry Lester, a barrister, and the former Kate Cooper-Smith, a milliner. At City of London School, he made sure the other Jewish boys observed the appropriate festivals.

When he was a 2nd Lieutenant with the Royal Artillery during his National Service, a senior officer barred him from a dance at the officers’ mess for refusing to list his religion as “C of E”.

Going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1957 with an exhibition, he read History and then Law. With Leon Brittan, he unsuccessfully sought the dismissal of careers staff who had made off-the-cuff anti-Semitic comments.

Graduating in 1960, Lester went on to take an LLM at Harvard Law School, having turned down a job with the Israeli foreign ministry. Arriving three weeks after the Ku Klux Klan’s murder of three civil rights activists in Mississippi, he became involved in the campaign, and in 1964 published his first book, Justice in the American South.

Called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn, where he was a Mansfield Scholar (and a Bencher from 1985), Lester joined 2 Hare Court (now Blackstone Chambers). Most of the work was commercial and humdrum, so he involved himself in politics and campaigning. He became central to the chambers, establishing its reputation as a leading set for human rights and judicial review cases, in turn making those more prominent features of the law.

His connection with Jenkins began in 1967 when he edited a book of his essays and speeches. When Jenkins returned to the Home Office for a second spell in 1974, he brought Lester in as a special adviser. They worked closely together for two years on race and sex discrimination legislation.

In 1968 Lester delivered a Fabian lecture calling for human rights legislation – the start of his 30-year campaign for Britain to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law.

Labour was reluctant to make such a commitment, Roy Hattersley arguing over the years that it would hand power from Parliament to the judges. When, finally, Tony Blair’s government passed the Human Rights Act in 1998, Lester felt it “bizarre that the mother of all parliaments should be the last to have it”.

Lester took silk in 1975. He was also called to the Irish Bar in 1983, and the bar of Northern Ireland a year later. From 1987 to 1993 he sat as a recorder.

In 1993 he was created a life peer; one of his neighbours in Herne Hill was the then Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler (Lord Butler of Brockwell).

Taking his seat that October, Lester served on Lords committees on EU law and institutions and the British constitution, and from 2001 to 2015 on the parliamentary Joint Human Rights Committee. He also spoke out vigorously in the Lords for the freedom of the press, particularly when the Leveson Inquiry was sitting.

Lester’s Lords career was brought to an end in 2018 by an episode that greatly exercised the House’s large complement of mainly retired lawyers, after a women’s rights campaigner claimed he had offered her a peerage in return for sexual favours.

That November, the Committee for Privileges and Conduct recommended that he be suspended from the House until June 2022.

A group of peers supporting Lester asserted that the Commissioner for Standards, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, had failed to act in accordance with the principles of natural justice and fairness. His fellow QC Lord Pannick put down an amendment not accepting the recommendation, and it was carried by 101 votes to 78.

The Senior Deputy Speaker, the Labour peer Lord McFall of Alcluith, insisted the Commissioner had “followed the processes as agreed by the House, and that have not been questioned before today”. The Committee for Privileges and Conduct renewed its call for Lester’s suspension.

Lester resigned from the Lords the following month, saying he did not have the strength or health to continue.

His books included Shawcross and Beaumont on Air Law (1964), Race and Law (1972), Constitutional Law and Human Rights (1996), Human Rights Law and Practice (1999) and Five Ideas to Fight For (2016).

In this last, he warned that human rights, equality, free speech, privacy and the rule of law were under attack under the pretext of taking back the sovereignty of Parliament. There had, he said, to be some protection for when Parliament misused its powers, for example in the hypothetical case of it deciding that all Jews should be exterminated.

Lester was an honorary professor at University College London and University College, Cork, and lectured at universities around the world. He was a member of the Board of Overseers of the University Pennsylvania Law School.

At various times he was the president of the now defunct Commonwealth human rights organisation Interights; chairman of the governors of James Allen’s Girls’ School; co-chairman of the European Roma Rights Centre; a council member of Justice; a governor of Westminster School and the British Institute of Human Rights; and an advisory board member of the Hull University’s Institute of European Public Law, and the Centre for Public Law at Cambridge University.

France appointed him a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2009.

Anthony Lester married in 1971 Catherine “Katya” Wassey, a fellow barrister. She survives him with their theatre director son Gideon, and their daughter, Maya, a QC.

Anthony Lester, born July 3 1936, died August 8 2020