Biography

Claude Moraes MEP was elected to the European Parliament for London in 1999 and again in 2004 where he led the London List of candidates. He was one of the first Asian MEPs and London's first ethnic minority MEP.  Claude was previously Director of JCWI, the national migration and refugee charity and Chief Executive of the Immigrants' Aid Trust. Before that, he was a national officer at the TUC, a representative to the European TUC in Brussels,  House of Commons adviser to MPs John Reid and Paul Boateng, and a CRE Commissioner. With a legal background, he has campaigned and written widely on human rights issues including recently co-authoring the 'Politics of Migration' (Blackwells). In the European Parliament he is Labour spokesperson on Employment and Social Affairs and a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

Background

Claude Ajit Moraes was an immigrant from India to the UK aged 6, with his parents settling in Scotland. He grew up in Dundee and Stirling attending comprehensive schools and studied Scots and English Law, Administrative Law and International Law at Dundee University, London University (Birkbeck College) and the London School of Economics.

Claude has worked in London since 1987, first for Dr John Reid MP and Paul Boateng MP in the House of Commons, and then as a national policy officer at the TUC's Congress House where he was also a representative to the European TUC in Brussels. In 1992, he was appointed Director of JCWI, the UK's only national independent organisation working on immigration, refugee and EU free movement issues. Throughout the 1990s he became a regular  media commentator and campaigner on migration issues and helped organise legal challenges in the High Court, Court of Appeal, and in Europe.   He was appointed a CRE Commissioner in 1998, was a Council member of Liberty, is on the Advisory Board of the OECD Development Centre, and is involved in a number of local and national charities including Education Action International, Boundary Community School, and Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. Claude lives in Hackney, London.

Main policy interests

In addition to his parliamentary committees, Claude is President of the Intergroup on Anti-Racism and Diversity, Co-President of the Intergroup on Ageing, and active on the issues of regeneration and social exclusion; older peoples' issues, human rights; employment rights; international development issues; and justice and home affairs issues including migration, people-trafficking, European police cooperation and the  Far Right in Europe. An elected member of Labour's National Policy Forum, he is currently on the Health Policy Commission.

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