Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC has been appointed to serve as the new Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, succeeding the Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury after his five year tenure as the expert body’s inaugural Chair. The High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom serves as the independent advisory body to the Media Freedom Coalition of States, currently co-chaired by the governments of Estonia and Germany.
The Media Freedom Coalition, including its High Level Panel, is extremely grateful to Lord Neuberger for his leadership since the Panel’s inception in 2019. The High Level Panel looks forward to continuing its work as the Coalition’s independent advisory body under Baroness Kennedy’s leadership.
Baroness Kennedy was a founding member of the High Level Panel and has contributed significantly to the Panel’s work both in her capacity as a member of the Panel and as Director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, which serves as Secretariat to the Panel.
Baroness Kennedy is a Barrister with over fifty years of experience of practice at the English Bar. She is widely regarded as one of the leading human rights practitioners in the U.K., representing defendants in many landmark cases in the English courts. She is a King’s Counsel, a member of the House of Lords in the UK Parliament and was appointed as a member of the Order of the Thistle in May of this year, the highest order of chivalry in Scotland. She has been Master of the Bench at Gray’s Inn and Master of Mansfield College, Oxford, during which time she also established the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University. She formerly chaired the British Council, JUSTICE, a leading all-party human rights and law reform organisation in the U.K. and has chaired a number of inquiries including the Power Inquiry, which reported on the state of British democracy. She has served as Director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute since 2019, an independent entity within the International Bar Association. In 2019, she was the lead criminal lawyer in the UN team investigating the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Can Yeginsu and Catherine Amirfar, Deputy Chairs of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, said:
“We are absolutely delighted that our brilliant colleague, Helena Kennedy, will be taking on this new role. She is a founding member of the High Level Panel and a leading force behind its establishment and continued work. At the five-year mark of the Coalition, she is ideally placed to help take us forward with our work.”
