Alan Lionel ShareSir Geoffrey Bindman KC was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle and Oriel College, Oxford, with two degrees in law: a BA (later converted to MA) and a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law in 1956, qualifying as a solicitor three years later He specialised in human rights law and was the founder of the human rights law firm Bindman & Partners. He has been Chair of the British Institute of Human Rights since 2005. He won The Law Society Gazette Centenary Award for Human Rights in 2003 and was knighted in 2007 for services to human rights. In 2011, he was appointed Queen's Counsel. He became a legal advisor to the Race Relations Board in 1966, a job he retained for 17 years, also following its merger into the Commission for Racial Equality. He also served as a legal advisor to Amnesty International and represented satirical magazine Private Eye. Elected as a Labour councillor for Camden London Borough Council in 1971, representing St John's ward. Along with his fellow councillors, they funded the establishment of the Camden Community Law Centre. It opened in 1973, and Bindman was the first chairman of its management committee. He has personally acted as a lawyer for numerous high-profile people including James Hanratty (executed in 1962), Keith Vaz and Jack Straw. In the late 1980s, Bindman visited South Africa as part of an International Commission of Jurists delegation sent to investigate apartheid and subsequently became editor of a book on the topic, South Africa and the Rule of Law. Bindman also continued his international human rights work, acting as a United Nations observer and representing Amnesty International's interests in the British litigation regarding Augusto Pinochet in the late 1990s. Read More Read Less