Shami Chakrabarti will explore the impact of the coalition government on rights and freedoms in the UK – two years after coming into power.

Titled ‘Common Values: The state of rights and freedoms in coalition Britain’, the talk is the third in an annual series of lectures established in memory of former Norwich South MP John Garrett, who died in 2007. Previous speakers have been Peter Hennessy and Chris Mullin.

Shami Chakrabarti has been director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) since 2003.

Originally a barrister, Shami first joined the organisation as in-house counsel in 2001. She became heavily involved in its engagement with the ‘war on terror’ and with the defence and promotion of human rights values in Parliament, the courts and wider society.

Since becoming director, she has written, spoken and broadcast widely on the importance of the post-World War Two human rights framework as an essential component of democratic society.

She is Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, a Governor of the London School of Economics and the British Film Institute, and a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. She was awarded an honorary degree by UEA in 2007.

Supported by UEA’s School of Political, Social and International Studies and Norwich Labour Party, the lecture will take place at 6.30pm on Thursday March 8 in the Thomas Paine Study Centre Lecture Theatre, UEA.

For more details visit www.uea.ac.uk/psi/eventsnews/events/john-garrett-lecture