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W
e are beyond delighted to announce that our guest of honour at the President’s Dinner on 6th October will be Nazir Afzal OBE.
During a 24 year career, Nazir prosecuted many of the most high-profile cases in the country and advised on many others. He was Chief Crown Prosecutor for NW England and formerly Director of Prosecutions in London. Most recently, he was Chief Executive of the country’s Police & Crime Commissioners, and led nationally on several legal topics including Violence against Women & Girls, and child sexual abuse. His prosecutions of the so called Rochdale grooming gang and hundreds of others were groundbreaking and changed the landscape of child protection. In 1999 he began working with groups like Karma Nirvana and Southall Black Sisters to address honour-based killings which often went unprosecuted or, when they did come to court, were seen as somehow less serious than ordinary murders. It soon became clear to him that as well as honour killings, the law also had to address a range of other abuse, and to wake up to honour-based suicides. What shocked him most was that the perpetrators of these violent acts were seen in their communities as heroes. “The rights of the vulnerable” he says, “of children, women and all of us individually must always trump the demands of any culture.” Among many current roles, he is the new Chancellor of the University of Manchester, National Adviser on Gender Based Violence to the Welsh Government, Independent member of Oxfam’s Safeguarding & Ethics Committee, independent Chair of the Catholic Church’s Safeguarding Agency.
SLS WELCOMES THE PROSECUTOR NAZIR AFZAL
Nazir has received many accolades: In 2005, he was awarded an OBE by the Queen for his work. He has also had the honour of being the only lawyer to ever prosecute a case before the Queen. In 2007, he received the UK Government’s Justice Award 2007 and was awarded the Daily Mirror newspaper “People’s award” voted for by readers. Nazir was also selected for the Asian Power 100 along with the Muslim Power 100 list. He was Asian Media Group’s “Man of the Year 2012.” Most recently, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pride of Birmingham awards 2022. He was awarded the first ever “Disruptor for Good” award at the Northern Power Women Awards 2022. Of course the pinnacle of his career was appearing as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. His music choices may have surprised some listeners – Jump Around by House of Pain; One in Ten by UB40; Set you Free by N-Trance (before Dale Longworth made his X-It). However, anyone who has read Nazir’s memoir “The Prosecutor” will know that in the Eighties, while working for the CPS by day, he was a club DJ by night. In the book he talks of his love for bands like UB40, Soul II Soul, and the ‘Bhangramuffin fusion’ of Apache Indian. But it is his work on femicide and VAWG – what he calls ‘gender terrorism’ – which makes Nazir such an appropriate guest speaker in a year when our chosen charity is Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service.
6 SH ROP SH IR E L AW YER
