Peter Ashman
He was born in St Albans, spent his childhood in Libya, Lebanon, and Westcliff-on-Sea, and studied law at King's College London.
In the 1970s he joined GLF and subsequently CHE. 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 including 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 contribution and legal expertise were central to this work.
In 1977 he became the legal officer of Justice, the International Commission of Jurists.
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 (now the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association, ILGA. Peter played a leading part in defining its goals and work programme which involved lobbying the European Commission, MEPs, and members of the Council of Europe. He continued to provide advice and support through the 1980s and 90s.
He was a member of the legal team in the case of Dudgeon v the United Kingdom before the European Court of Human Rights. 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 Strasbourg by barristers Lord Gifford and Terry Munyard (another CHE member) this resulted in the historic 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, and paved the way for other highly significant judgments in the ECHR. The Court's decision led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland, and ultimately to decriminalisation throughout Europe.
In 1992 he set up the office of the European Human Rights Foundation in Brussels.
In 2004 he became an adviser to the Foreign Office on human rights, and promoted the idea that British embassies should support LGBT rights in their host countries.
External links
- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/20/peter-ashman Obituary in The Guardian, 20 March 2014.
- http://www.ilga-europe.org/home/news/latest/peter_ashman Nigel Warner, "Peter Ashman - an important figure in the founding of ILGA" ILGA Europe.
- http://andyquan.com/vale-peter-ashman/ Andy Quan, "Vale Peter Ashman".
