Controversial campaigner to give annual Brandt Group lecture about her humanitarian aid charity

Baroness Cox of Queensbury is to present this year’s Brandt Group Lecture under the title “The Pain and the Passion – the privilege of making a difference”.  Her lecture is on Thursday, March 5 at 8pm at Marlborough College’s Memorial Hall.

Baroness Cox is the tireless leader of HART – the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust – which she founded in 2003.

During a long career in public life, she has played a controversial role in politics, humanitarian work and international affairs.  

But it is her work with HART that will feature in her lecture.  She will, she says, be inviting the audience to travel with her to meet some of the inspirational people she works with and supports in countries such as Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, Burma and the virtually unknown land of Nagorno Karabakh.

HART works in conflict or post-conflict regions helping people who are largely off the radar screen of international media and many aid organisations and are suffering oppression and persecution.  HART supports these people – regardless of their faith tradition.

“Often”, she says, “they are trapped behind closed borders suffering from repressive regimes who deny access to major aid organisations, so we spend some of our time crossing borders unofficially – and shamelessly (quite exciting and challenging!) – to provide aid and advocacy for people who are unreached, un-helped and unheard.”

Recently Baroness Cox’s humanitarian aid work with HART has taken her on many missions to conflict and post-conflict zones:
•    to the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh; Sudan; South Sudan; Nigeria; Uganda.
•    to the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Chin and Kachin peoples in the jungles of Burma.
•    to communities suffering from conflict in Indonesia where she helped to establish the International Islamic Christian Organisation for Reconciliation and Reconstruction.  
•    to North Korea helping to promote Parliamentary initiatives and medical programmes.

As part of this work, Lady Cox has been instrumental in helping to change the former Soviet Union’s policies on orphaned and abandoned children from care in institutions to foster family care.

The practice of slavery in Sudan has been a primary concern for HART and it is not always seen as a simple issue.   The policy of Christian human rights groups engaged in ‘slave redemption’ – that is buying slaves to set them free – is the source of great controversy. Their critics – among them Unicef, Human Rights Watch, Anti-Slavery International and Save The Children – accuse them of adopting methods which perpetuate rather than eliminate the practice.

Baroness Cox was made a life peer in 1982 and was a deputy speaker of the House of Lords from 1985 to 2005.  She had started out as an academic teaching sociology.  Later she was Founder Chancellor of Bournemouth University, Founder Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University and, reflecting her early work on nursing education, is an Honorary Vice President of the Royal College of Nursing.

She is often associated in the press with the quotation “If we don’t do something, we are condoning it”.   She used it in opposing the introduction of sharia law in Britain. And that is exactly the sort of topic or controversial cause most mainstream politicians will not touch, but Baroness Cox – freed from party politics when, as a Eurosceptic, she had the Tory whip withdrawn for signing a pro-UKIP letter – seems to relish.

Over the years she has become embroiled in many controversies.  Among them rows about a book that attacked gays and lesbians and surrounding her support for an organisation that came out against the formation of a Palestinian state.

But with such a rich history of campaigning and, sometimes, little regard for the conventional approach to solving the problems of oppressed people, her lecture will undoubtedly be a significant addition to the Brandt Group’s fine record of bringing leading figures and issues to Marlborough.