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UK LAWMAKER AND STAUNCH ARMENIAN CAUSE DEFENDER PASSES AWAY
Thursday, June 19th, 2014 | Posted by Contributor
Ben Whitaker
LONDON (The Guardian)--The former Labour member of parliament for
Hampstead, north London, Ben Whitaker, who has died aged 79, was
the embodiment of the liberal values associated with the area. At
the 1966 election he won the Hampstead seat, for 81 years a Tory
fiefdom, from the reactionary former home secretary Henry Brooke,
and championed the progressive social reforms of the Harold Wilson
government, in which he held a number of posts. Subsequently, as a
human rights lawyer long before this was a fashionable career, he
made distinguished contributions to civil liberties in Britain, and
especially abroad, through his leadership of the Minority Rights Group
and then of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and as a UN rapporteur.
Ben was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Major General Sir John
Whitaker and his wife, Pamela (nee Snowden), who were not modern enough
to avoid sending him to Eton. He subsequently did national service in
the Coldstream Guards, before graduating from New College, Oxford,
to the bar. After what he described as this "Victorian education,"
he lectured in law at London University and became outraged at the
conduct of the police, who at the time were framing Stephen Ward,
planting bricks on political protesters and, in Sheffield, had been
caught beating suspects with rhino whips. His first book, The Police
(1964), was written with the object of restricting their powers.
As a Labour member of parliament, he served as parliamentary private
secretary to the minister for overseas development and then to the
minister for housing, finding time to write Crime and Society (1967),
Participation and Poverty (1968) and Parks for People (1971).
In 1971 he became executive director of the Minority Rights Group,
writing and publishing well-researched reports on communities - some
that had never been mentioned before by the media - that were being
subjected to physical and cultural destruction by their states or
through the actions of multinational corporations. "Indigenous rights"
was a little-known concept at the time.
In 1975, David Owen appointed him as British representative on a
UN sub-committee on the rights of minorities, and in 1985 it handed
him the hottest of hot potatoes: to investigate whether the Turkish
atrocities against the Armenians amounted to genocide. He concluded
emphatically that they did, and refused to withdraw his report despite
a furious response from Turkey. In recent years he was particularly
critical of "genocide equivocation" by the UK government, which refused
to mention his report and claimed that the evidence for Turkish guilt
was "not sufficiently unequivocal." He was pleased when this misleading
formula, devised by the Foreign Office to avoid political and economic
reprisals from Turkey, was finally exposed and dropped in 2010.
Ben maintained strong and combative interests both in defending
culture from political philistines and in encouraging new forms of art
that governments were not prepared to subsidize. Later, as executive
director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he took great pleasure
in encouraging competition between museums and in backing art that was
too experimental or "political" for government funders to contemplate.
His work for the foundation, which was established in Portugal,
earned him a Portuguese Order of Merit.
He is survived by Janet and their children, Quincy, Dan and Rasaq;
Aaron, a son from a previous relationship; and seven grandchildren.
http://asbarez.com/124264/uk-lawmaker-and-staunch-armenian-cause-defender-passes-away/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Thursday, June 19th, 2014 | Posted by Contributor
Ben Whitaker
LONDON (The Guardian)--The former Labour member of parliament for
Hampstead, north London, Ben Whitaker, who has died aged 79, was
the embodiment of the liberal values associated with the area. At
the 1966 election he won the Hampstead seat, for 81 years a Tory
fiefdom, from the reactionary former home secretary Henry Brooke,
and championed the progressive social reforms of the Harold Wilson
government, in which he held a number of posts. Subsequently, as a
human rights lawyer long before this was a fashionable career, he
made distinguished contributions to civil liberties in Britain, and
especially abroad, through his leadership of the Minority Rights Group
and then of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and as a UN rapporteur.
Ben was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Major General Sir John
Whitaker and his wife, Pamela (nee Snowden), who were not modern enough
to avoid sending him to Eton. He subsequently did national service in
the Coldstream Guards, before graduating from New College, Oxford,
to the bar. After what he described as this "Victorian education,"
he lectured in law at London University and became outraged at the
conduct of the police, who at the time were framing Stephen Ward,
planting bricks on political protesters and, in Sheffield, had been
caught beating suspects with rhino whips. His first book, The Police
(1964), was written with the object of restricting their powers.
As a Labour member of parliament, he served as parliamentary private
secretary to the minister for overseas development and then to the
minister for housing, finding time to write Crime and Society (1967),
Participation and Poverty (1968) and Parks for People (1971).
In 1971 he became executive director of the Minority Rights Group,
writing and publishing well-researched reports on communities - some
that had never been mentioned before by the media - that were being
subjected to physical and cultural destruction by their states or
through the actions of multinational corporations. "Indigenous rights"
was a little-known concept at the time.
In 1975, David Owen appointed him as British representative on a
UN sub-committee on the rights of minorities, and in 1985 it handed
him the hottest of hot potatoes: to investigate whether the Turkish
atrocities against the Armenians amounted to genocide. He concluded
emphatically that they did, and refused to withdraw his report despite
a furious response from Turkey. In recent years he was particularly
critical of "genocide equivocation" by the UK government, which refused
to mention his report and claimed that the evidence for Turkish guilt
was "not sufficiently unequivocal." He was pleased when this misleading
formula, devised by the Foreign Office to avoid political and economic
reprisals from Turkey, was finally exposed and dropped in 2010.
Ben maintained strong and combative interests both in defending
culture from political philistines and in encouraging new forms of art
that governments were not prepared to subsidize. Later, as executive
director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he took great pleasure
in encouraging competition between museums and in backing art that was
too experimental or "political" for government funders to contemplate.
His work for the foundation, which was established in Portugal,
earned him a Portuguese Order of Merit.
He is survived by Janet and their children, Quincy, Dan and Rasaq;
Aaron, a son from a previous relationship; and seven grandchildren.
http://asbarez.com/124264/uk-lawmaker-and-staunch-armenian-cause-defender-passes-away/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress