CHAKRABARTI, Shami, (Mrs M. J. Hopper)

Director, Liberty, since 2003; b 16 June 1969; d of Shyamalendou and Shyamali Chakrabarti; m 1995, Martyn John Hopper; one s. Educ: LSE (LLB). Called to the Bar, Middle Temple, 1994; lawyer, Legal Advr’s Br., Home Office, 1996-2001; In-house Counsel, Liberty, 2001-03. Recreations inc: popular cinema, playing with my son.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI knows perfectly well that the human rights campaigner has a certain image, assiduously stoked by certain politicians, in particular by the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, she believes. Consequently stereotype would have it that the director of Liberty shouts a lot, cares more about murderers than victims, is against everything and for nothing and, naturally, drives a BMW. The mad libertarian who is against the State.

This is not the way Chakrabarti comes across in her frequent appearances on radio and television. She is careful to be calm, measured and rational, and, as it happens, lives in a mixed part of southwest London, where, as she points out, the big houses are inhabited by MPs. And after a childhood accident in which her violin case saved her from being crushed to death by a car, she chooses not to drive. More complicated than the former Home Secretary might suppose then.

“I can claim to have had a certain experience of real life having been to a comprehensive school and experienced racism in the streets,” she points out.

Yet there is no doubting her passion for Liberty’s causes. Does she always feel as calm as she sounds, I wonder.

“I do feel very cross but I try to restrain myself,” she says. “I feel strongly about the most fundamental violations, incarceration without trial and forced destitution of asylum-seekers. I also feel strongly about the criminalisation of children, children who die in custody — it’s hard not to because of your empathy with human beings. It’s not purely an intellectual notion. But what I say in public is not necessarily the way that I put things in my kitchen when I’m talking to my family.

“It’s always my biggest worry when I do big broadcast media things that I will start ranting because sometimes I feel so shocked at what’s being said. I was on Question Time with Harriet Harman, the Solicitor-General, who used to work at Liberty. Belmarsh came up and she kept saying that it was a simple matter of asylum control. I was screaming inside. I was having to take deep breaths and thinking, ‘I can’t believe she’s saying this.

’ She’s a very nice woman actually (maybe being a former civil servant means I can distinguish between people and their positions) but it was so heavy and I was really trying to stop myself from ranting.

“After the taping I phoned my husband and said, ‘I think I’ve blown it for Liberty. I ranted.’ He said I hadn’t and when I watched it I realised that, mercifully, I hadn’t said anything that I’d felt.”

Chakrabarti grew up in a semi in Queensbury, northwest London. Her Indian parents, like many of their generation, discussed politics and justice at the dinner table and Chakrabarti remembers a conversation with her father about the Yorkshire Ripper when she was 12.

“I said it was obvious that he was a complete animal and what I thought they should do to him. My father said no criminal justice system would ever be perfect and told me to imagine what it would be like to be convicted of a terrible murder — climbing the steps to the scaffold, knowing you hadn’t done it but that you’re about to die for it. This had such a profound effect on me, it brings tears to my eyes now. I felt the need to protect people from serious crime and to treat human beings with some basic dignity. It somehow became inevitable that I would study law. But then I discovered a world of stuffy old white men and I thought perhaps it wasn’t for me.”

She drifted to the Bar which she found “pretty unreconstructed. Temperamentally I’m a team player rather than a rugged individualist.” So after a stint pulling pints in the Middle Temple bar, where she met her husband, she applied for a job as a lawyer in the Home Office on the basis that if she believed in changing things she could begin to do so from within.

But it would be a mistake to view her as an obsessive campaigner; her life is more balanced than that, she maintains. When I ask whether she misses the higher salary she might earn as a barrister she says: “I’m not a saint, but I don’t want for anything. The rounded picture of me? Being a woman is highly relevant. It’s not all of who I am but it’s a central part of it, just as being Asian is, just as being a mother is. Probably the most important part of my identity is as a mum, which has been a complete revelation to me. I don’t think you can separate these things from the way you feel about human rights issues.”

When I listen to the recording of our conversation I realise that no matter what my question to Chakrabarti, in reply she is inclined to ram home — in her pleasant, calm way of course — the central points she wishes to make. Rather good at her job, I’d say.

PENNY WARK

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