The Blomfield Award - honouring an unsung human rights hero

One of my heroes is a quiet man, generally unnoticed by the media, unsung, not the recipient of glittering awards. He is a veteran British parliamentarian and advocate and defender of human rights of the oppressed in many parts of the world. He is Lord Avebury.

Yesterday afternoon the UK Baha’i community honoured Lord Avebury for his consistent, thorough and outstanding work in support of the human rights of the Baha’is in Iran and Egypt by presenting him with the Blomfield Award. Around 35 of Eric Avebury’s family, friends and colleagues came to the Baha’i Centre in London’s Knightsbridge district to mark the occasion. Guests included Mrs Bemma Donkoh, London representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Rt Hon Anne Clwyd MP, the Prime Minister’s special envoy to Iraq and Chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group.

Lady Lindsay Avebury, Mrs Bemma Donkoh and Lord Avebury

Rob Weinberg, Secretary for External Affairs, welcomed the guests and gave a brief introduction to the Baha’i Faith, highlighting historical links with Britain, and reminding everyone of the current worsening of the persecution of the Baha’is in Iran.

It then fell to me to pay tribute (and the tribute came right from the heart) to Eric Avebury and to thank him for his constant support for the Baha’is in Iran and Egypt. Back in the summer of 1998, not long after I had been elected Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the UK for the first time, I received a phone call from a member of the Universal House of Justice, the community’s world governing council, to say that Mr Ruhollah Rohani had been executed in Iran because he was a Baha’i; I was to inform our government. Were that call to come today (God forbid), I would know exactly what to do. But in 1998 I had no experience of that kind of work and we had no specialist external affairs staff as we do today.

I managed to locate the correct Foreign Office official and went to see him. Not long after, somebody suggested I talk to Lord Avebury. I went with our newly appointed public information officer, Carmel Momen, to Eric’s home and explained the situation. He listened carefully and sympathetically, and, being a person of action, he wrote to the Foreign Secretary.

He was the first parliamentarian at that time actively to support our work to protect the human rights of the Baha’is in Iran. And he was a founder member and officer of the All Party Parliamentary Friends of the Baha’is that we set up in 1999. He is still very active as an officer of the group.

Eric may be self-effacing, but he is absolutely thorough and tenacious in his human rights advocacy. If he doesn’t receive a satisfactory reply to any question he puts to a minister, he writes again until he gets the truth.

In his reply to Rob’s and my speeches, Eric spoke warmly of the Faith, saying how much he admires Baha’is principles such as the equality of women and men and bringing an end to racism. He also spoke of his admiration for Lady Blomfield, who - inspired by her faith as a Baha’i - was very active for the rights of children in the years after the First World War (she was a co-founder of the Save the Children Fund) and tireless promoted the rights of women and the new League of Nations. Interestingly, the present National Baha’i Centre in London was partly paid for in 1954 by a bequest from Lady Blomfield.

Lord Avebury with Anne Clwyd MP

Anne Clwyd MP, long-time friend and parliamentary colleague of Eric Avebury, also paid a warm tribute to him. She explained that she had taken over from him as Chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group. He had really dedicated much of his parliamentary career to human rights and, she said, we need more parliamentarians like Eric Avebury.

If you visit Eric Avebury’s blog you will see that he is very much a family man. His son John was at the reception with his girlfriend. And there was a refugee family there, whose asylum in the UK Eric had helped to secure. They clearly loved him very much.

I felt deeply honoured to be able to present the Blomfield Award to Lord Avebury. Anne Clwyd is right. We need more parliamentarians like him: tenacious, principled, free of ego and exercising his capacities for the benefit of others. Eric’s wife said privately that he had never received any awards for his human rights work. She had seen a glittering award in New York go to some celebrity or other who had done some little thing for human rights, but Eric had never been thus honoured. He was, she said, very pleased indeed to have been selected by the Baha’is for the Blomfield Award.

Dan Wheatley, Barney Leith, Shila Behjat, Eric and Lindsday Avebury, Rob Weinberg

[All the photographs in this post are © Hamid Jahanpour.]

Technorati Tags: Eric Avebury, human rights, Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, Blomfield Award

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