Sir Geoffrey Lionel Bindman KC (Hon) (born 3 January 1933) is a British solicitor specialising in human rights law, and founder of the human rights law firm Bindman & Partners (now Bindmans LLP). He was Chair of the British Institute of Human Rights from 2005 to 2013.
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 and in 2023 he received the Lexis Nexis award for his lifetime contribution to the law.
He was a Visiting Professor of Law at University College London until 2023 and remains a Visiting Professor at London South Bank University, an Honorary Fellow in Civil Legal Process at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies.
He has lectured at law schools in Britain, America, and other countries. He is a regular writer and broadcaster in the specialist and national media on human rights, media law, anti-discrimination law, and the legal profession.
Born: Geoffrey Lionel Bindman 3 January 1933 (age 91), Education: Oriel College, Oxford (MA, BCL), Spouse: Lynn Winton (m. 1961), Children: 3
Early life
He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne to a family descended from Jewish immigrants. His father Gerald (1904–1974) was a GP who married Rachael Lena Doberman in 1929.
He attended the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and then left 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.
His brother is Professor David Bindman (born 1940), emeritus Durning-Lawrence professor of the history of art at University College London and research fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
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NLJ Features Career
He became Legal Adviser to the Race Relations Board in 1966, an appointment he retained for 17 years, also following its merger into the Commission for Racial Equality. He also served as a legal adviser to Amnesty International and represented satirical magazine Private Eye.
He was elected as a Labour councillor for Camden London Borough Council in 1971, representing St John’s ward. At the time, he was a partner at Lawfords, a solicitors’ firm in Gray’s Inn.
He and fellow councillors founded the Camden Community Law Centre. It opened in 1973, and Geoffrey was the first chairman of its management committee. He did not stand at the subsequent council elections in 1974.
In 1974, He established Bindman & Partners (now Bindmans LLP) as a firm with the aim of “protecting the rights and freedoms of ordinary people.”
He and the firm acted for numerous high-profile people including the family of the late James Hanratty in challenging his conviction for murder, Olympic athletes and MPs Keith Vaz and Jack Straw.
Human rights missions and inquiries overseas from the early 1970s to the 1990s included trips to Uganda, Zimbabwe, Chile, Soviet Union, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, Namibia, and Malaysia.
In the late 1980s, he visited South Africa as part of an International Commission of Jurists delegation sent to investigate apartheid and subsequently edited a book on the topic, South Africa and the Rule of Law.
He also continued his international human rights work, acting as a United Nations observer at the first democratic election in South Africa and representing Amnesty International’s interests in the British litigation regarding Augusto Pinochet in the late 1990s.
In 2008 Bindman & Partners became Bindmans LLP.
In September 2012, he told BBC Radio 4 he agreed with Desmond Tutu that British prime minister Tony Blair should be prosecuted on the grounds that starting the Iraq War was a “crime of aggression” in breach of the United Nations Charter.
In March 2023, he became a signatory to the “Lawyers are responsible” Declaration of Conscience.
Honours
He received honorary law doctorates (LLD) from De Montfort University in 2000, and the Kingston University in 2006. He was given the Liberty Award for Lifetime Human Rights Achievement in 1999, and the Centenary Award for Human Rights by The Law Society Gazette in 2003.
He was knighted by the Queen in 2007. In 2023 he received the Lexis Nexis award for his lifetime contribution to the law.
Personal life
He is a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He lists his recreations as “walking, music, book collecting”.
In 1961, he married research scientist Lynn Winton. She became a reader in Physiology at University College London.