(Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC) is a practising member of Blackstone Chambers, Temple, London EC4Y 9BW. He specialises in constitutional and administrative law and international human rights law. He is a co-founder and Honorary President of INTERIGHTS and a founding member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights.

He is co-editor of Lester, Pannick and Herberg, Human Rights Law and Practice, LexisNexis, 3rd ed., April 2009, and Editor in Chief of Butterworths Human Rights Cases. He has argued many leading cases in the British courts, the two European Courts and Commonwealth Courts.

Lord Lester was Special Adviser to Roy Jenkins (1974-76) and an architect of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the Race Relations Act 1976. Since becoming a members of the House of Lords in 1993, he has introduced a series of Private Member’s Bills which have led to the Human Rights Act 1998, the Civil Partnership Ac 2004, the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007, the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, and the Equality Act 2010. His most recent Bill seeks to reform English defamation law.