Shami Chakrabarti

Shami Chakrabarti   (Lawyer)
Born	Sharmishta Chakrabarti 1969-06-16 London, United Kingdom
Alma mater	London School of Economics
Children	one son
Spouse	Martyn Hopper
Member of	British-American Project, Ditchley/UK, WEF/Young Global Leaders/2006
Party	Social Democratic Party, Labour
Known for being a long time director of Liberty, the UK civil liberties advocacy organisation, but with some interesting connections.

Shami Chakrabarti (born 16 June 1969) is a British barrister involved in human rights. From September 2003 to March 2016, she was director of Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties.

In September 2014, Shami Chakrabarti took up the role as Chancellor of Essex University.

When nominated for a peerage in August 2016, she said:

“I am honoured to accept Jeremy Corbyn’s challenge and the opportunity to help hold the government to account. This is a dangerous moment for our country and we share vital human rights values that need defending more than ever before in my lifetime.”

Labour Party "antisemitism"

On 29 April 2016, Jeremy Corbyn appointed Chakrabarti to chair an inquiry into alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. As a party member, Chakrabarti said she was confident her independence would not be compromised. The inquiry followed what Jewish author Norman Finkelstein called a “smear campaign” of “political blackmail”, which was led by right-wing media outlets and pro-Israel commentators in an attempt to undermine the Labour leader and his allies. The aim of the report was to show that Corbyn was serious about cracking down on all forms of racism present in his party.

Chakrabarti report

On 30 June 2016, Shami Chakrabarti launched her report at what should have been an incredibly positive press conference for party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Instead, the mainstream media seemed to focus its efforts on kicking Corbyn while he was down rather than covering the outcome of the anti-racism report. Unfortunately, says Chakrabarti, the mainstream media’s misleading posts on 30 June “cast a shadow over two months’ really hard, open-hearted work”. While her report did find some “minority hateful or ignorant attitudes” and some “bitter incivility of discourse”, it also concluded that: "[the] Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism." It also said:

"Labour members should be free and positively encouraged to criticise injustice and abuse wherever they find it, including in the Middle East… But surely it is better to use the modern universal language of human rights, be it of dispossession, discrimination, segregation, occupation or persecution."

Chakrabarti complained on LBC and BBC Radio 4 that the media had been "so quick today to trash our open-hearted work." She defended Jeremy Corbyn’s condemnation of stereotypes aimed at minority religious groups, which had been shamefully manipulated by a media establishment clearly out for blood.

The Labour leader had made it very clear that both antisemitism and Islamophobia were equally unacceptable, insisting:

"Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations."

As anti-Corbyn figures in politics and the media rushed to condemn this poignant comment as somehow antisemitic, which it clearly wasn’t, Chakrabarti said:

"I am a little heart-sore with the misrepresentation of those remarks about Israel… I’m really, really disappointed with the people that have spun that."

Chakrabarti finished her interview with LBC radio by praising Corbyn’s Labour party for giving her the independence to undertake such a valuable investigation, and made a very clear comparison with other parties, asking:

"Where is the inquiry in either UKIP or the Conservative Party into holocaust metaphors that have been used in the referendum campaign?"

Walkout by Ruth Smeeth

Another issue ‘spun’ by the media was the walkout at the inquiry’s press conference of Ruth Smeeth, the Stoke-on-Trent North MP who previously worked as Director of Public Affairs and Campaigns at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) – a pro-Israel lobby group with historically close ties to Labour party right wingers.

Smeeth, who The Electronic Intifada has called an “Israel lobby spin doctor”, claimed she had left the press conference abruptly because an activist had “used traditional anti-Semitic slurs to attack me for being part of a ‘media conspiracy'.”

Momentum activist

In reality, neither the Jewish faith nor talk of a conspiracy were mentioned. The activist in question – Momentum Black Connexions (MBC) media officer and the-latest.com editor Marc Wadsworth – actually said:

"I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of a press release to Ruth Smeeth MP, so you can see who’s working hand in hand."

The only obvious suggestion here was of alleged collusion between the Telegraph and Smeeth herself – who Wadsworth later claimed he didn’t even know was Jewish. But voices in the mainstream media desperate to smear Jeremy Corbyn and anyone vaguely supportive of him jumped all over Smeeth’s comments about possible antisemitism.

The-latest.com soon slammed the UK’s media establishment for the ensuing slander against Wadsworth, calling it “a Fleet Street concocted firestorm.”

Chakrabarti also steered away from labelling Wadsworth – an anti-racism activist and self-proclaimed “ally of the Jewish people” – an antisemite. She did claim, however, to have been “disappointed” by the comment directed at Smeeth, and insisted that it had done Labour and the cause of anti-racism “no favours”.

Criticism of Prevent

In 2009 she termed the UK government's Prevent strategy aimed at preventing Muslims from being lured into violent extremism "as the biggest spying programme in Britain ... and an affront to civil liberties".

Connections

Chakrabarti is an alumna of the British-American Project, and has been a governor of the Ditchley Foundation.

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
2006 Counter Terror World Summit	5 December 2006	6 December 2006	London Olympia	Bunch of "counter-terrorists" who met in London 2006

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Labour Party exclusions: we need justice for the many not just for the few	Article	2 March 2018	David Rosenberg	The Labour Party's departing General Secretary Iain McNicol has done everything possible to delay or prevent the implementation of the Chakrabarti Inquiry Report which needs to be the central focus of our campaigning right now, if we are going to win justice for the many suspended and excluded by Labour, not just for the few.
Document:The shortcomings of the EHRC Report	Statement	6 November 2020	Jewish Voice for Labour	There are just 12 mentions of Jeremy Corbyn in the EHRC report, of which only two concern actions taken by him. It is reprehensible not to distinguish between actions taken by individuals supportive of Corbyn and those taken by people hostile to him – such an omission leads to the impression that all failings were Corbyn’s responsibility.

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