Difference between revisions of "Talk:Peter Ashman"

Revision as of 08:01, 2 May 2014

Following material by Nick Billingham in the CHE Annual Report 2013-2014 to be incorporated as appropriate. --Ross Burgess (talk) 03:01, 2 May 2014 (CDT)

Peter Ashman (1950-2014)

Peter Ashman, who died on 21 February 2014 of pancreatic cancer, joined CHE in the mid-1970s as a young, newly-qualified lawyer with a strong interest in gay rights. He quickly became in-volved in setting up CHE’s law reform committee and was a well-known figure at CHE conferences. The law reform committee work involved drafting policy papers in-cluding CHE’s evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee’s inquiry into the age of consent, and lobbying Parliament on legislation affecting lesbians and gay men, such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 which covered soliciting. The committee met regularly each month from 1977 to 1989 and Peter’s contribu-tion and legal expertise were central to this work. But Peter’s work for lesbian and gay rights went much wider than this. He was a member of the legal team in the case taken by Jeff Dudgeon to the Euro-pean Court of Human Rights to challenge the crimi-nalisation of male homosexual acts in Northern Ireland which remained in force after the partial de- criminalisation in England and Wales. Together with Paul Crane, another lawyer and CHE member, he was responsible for preparing the legal arguments un-derlying the case. After four years of argument culminating in the presentation to the court in Stras-bourg by barristers Lord Gifford and Terry Munyard (another CHE member) this resulted in the his-toric judgment in 1981 that the right to a private life under Article 8 of the European Convention includes the right to a private sex life, the first time that gay rights were recognised by any international human rights tribunal. This forced the British Government to change the law in Northern Ireland, and paved the way for other highly significant judgments in the ECHR. In the following 20 years some 23 jurisdictions in Council of Europe member states, including Ireland, decriminalised homosexual relations. In 1978 Peter was contacted by the Dutch gay group COC to discuss setting up an international gay rights association. The resulting meeting at the CHE Conference in Coventry in August 1978, attended by activists from 14 different countries, led to the setting up of the International Gay Association. Peter played a leading part in defining its goals and work pro-gramme which involved lobbying the European Com-mission, MEPs, and members of the Council of Europe. He continued to provide advice and support through the 1980s and 90s. As the International Les-bian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association, ILGA, it is now recognised by the European Union and the United Nations as a respected and effective advocate for LGBT rights. Peter’s other work for gay rights included taking cases to the European Court on the armed forces, and arguing for an equal age of consent (for which CHE member Richard Desmond bravely put himself for-ward as a seventeen year old test case). Peter was involved in persuading the UK Charity Commission to agree that explicitly gay organisations could be given charitable status in law: London Friend was one of the first charities to benefit from this. In 1989 he played a significant part in setting up Stonewall as a full-time lobbying organisation in response to the passing of Section 28: for the first six months of Stonewall’s existence it operated from the front room of his house in Islington. Peter also worked for several years for Justice, the organisation dealing with miscarriages of justice, taking up cases of immigration and prisoners’ rights. In 1982 he put forward the idea for a television docu-mentary series investigating such miscarriages; this led to the BBC series Rough Justice; he became a familiar figure on the programme and provided a number of case studies. It played a role in securing the release from prison of 18 people and is widely credited with the eventual establishment of the offi-cial body to review miscarriages of justice. Subsequently Peter’s career took him to Brussels where he set up the European Human Rights Founda-tion and was an adviser to the European Commission, before in 2004 returning to London as a human rights adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In that capacity he drafted a programme for British embassies abroad to promote the rights of LGBT people around the world. It provided an example for the development of similar programmes by the EU and the US State Department. Such a record of activity and achievement is remarkable for anyone, but in Peter’s case it was com-bined with a wonderful and engaging capacity for friendship and fun for which his many friends in CHE and outside will always remember him. His friend and long-term collaborator in CHE and ILGA, Nigel Warner, has spoken of Peter’s “extra-ordinary understanding of how things worked and how to get things done”, his “extraordinary generosity and patience in supporting and mentoring others” and his “quite irrepressible optimism that, however worrying the immediate circumstances, eventually things would come right. This kept him working patiently and positively for LGBT rights all through the dark years of the 1980s. ... His personal commitment to fighting injustice ... could go well beyond just pro-viding legal support: he was willing if need be to take significant personal risks to help others.” Peter’s death at the comparatively early age of 63 is a cruel blow to his civil partner Poramate Jitsopas, to whom we send our condolences and to all those for whom he was a true friend and inspiration.