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This weekend saw claims that��anti-terror squad officers trawled the e-mails of Conservative frontbencher Damian Green for correspondence connected with Ms Chakrabarti as part of their investigations into Home Office leaks. It is timely therefore, that her lecture will address the increasingly difficult debate about balancing the state's responsibility for security with the impact on individual human rights.

“Small Places Close to Home: the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt”, will discuss how efforts to promote universal human rights often have modest beginnings starting in the small places close to home, and with individuals who spread the message.

Societies throughout the world are engaged in the debate about how best to balance security concerns with civil liberties. Eleanor Roosevelt’s emphasis on rights at the individual level, first expounded in the 1950s is, argues Shami Chakrabarti, every bit as relevant today.

Shami Chakrabarti trained as a barrister and has been Director of Liberty since 2003. She was heavily involved in its engagement with the “War on Terror” and has been instrumental in the defence and promotion of human rights in Parliament, the courts and wider society. She has written and broadcast widely on the importance of the human rights framework and is Chancellor of Oxford Brookes ̽��ֱ��

Newnham has organised a lecture in memorial of its leading founder, Henry Sidgwick biennially since 1901. Sidgwick - a Professor of Philosophy – had risked the censure of his fellow (male) academics by first organising lectures for female students, and then in 1871 renting a house for those who couldn’t travel to Cambridge on a daily basis to study.

From these small beginnings Newnham College was born and it’s easy to imagine that Henry Sidgwick’s pioneering spirit might have been greatly admired by Eleanor Roosevelt as she broke new ground for both the civil right’s and women’s movements in a period in history that took in the Great Depression, World War II and the establishment of the United Nations.

A feminist who broke the dictates of her time, Eleanor Roosevelt was played a key role in drawing up the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. She also understood the impact small actions on attitudes and discrimination. As First Lady she held more than three hundred press conferences which she restricted to female journalists knowing it would force news organisations to hire female reporters to cover them, she refused to abide by a segregation ordinance that required her to sit in the white section of the audience at a Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama in 1938 and she was responsible for securing the first US government funds ever allotted for the building of childcare centres.

̽��ֱ��Newnham Henry Sidwick Endowed Lecture
5.30pm Friday 24 April
LG 19 Faculty of Law
̽��ֱ��event is free and there is no requirement to book.