Shami Chakrabarti

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2008

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti. A pithy and incisive speaker, she is rarely out of the media spotlight and has been voted 'one of our most inspiring political figures'. She joined Liberty the day before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and, as the events unfolded on the television screens, it was, she says, impossible to predict just how much they would shape the civil rights debate in the years that followed. For her, it was not just a matter of philosophical or political principle - her son was born soon after the attacks and his birth, she says, influenced her own feelings: "I understood more what it is to be afraid, what it is to really worry about whether your family are going to be blown up on the underground."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone Book: To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee Luxury: A private screening room with movies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is Shami Chacrabati. As Director of Liberty, she has used
0:31.7	her badister's training to huge effect,
0:34.0	adroitly parrying what she perceives as fundamental assaults on our civil liberties,
0:39.0	a recent high point for her the defeat of the government's 42-day detention bill for terror suspects.
0:44.0	Despite her diminutive stature and relative youth, she is still in her 30s,
0:49.0	she regularly slugs it out in the media with political bruisers and has been voted one of our most inspiring political figures.
0:57.0	Her inspiration? To kill a mockingbird.
1:00.0	It's the 10th of September 2001 and that was the day before 9-11 the events that have done
1:15.9	probably more than anything else to shape the debate that we are currently in the
1:20.8	middle of about our human rights. Do you remember what you were doing on that
1:24.4	actual day of 9-11? I certainly do. As you said, it was my second day at Liberty. I had a new job.
1:30.7	I was meeting colleagues and chatting about what the future might hold for a campaign
1:36.1	group like Liberty, what the priorities should be. I had lunch with a new colleague and
1:40.8	when I returned we saw the pictures appearing on people's
1:44.4	computer screens and on the television and it was of course completely horrific I
1:49.8	don't think I quite knew at the time but I was also pregnant and in the weeks and months that followed I thought you've just
1:56.4	left the home office is this the time to be leaving all your chums in the home office
2:01.2	who were trying to keep people safe and and is this the time to be bringing a new life into the world?
2:06.3	I mean so many issues of course have flowed from 9-11 and people have talked exhaustively about them and maybe we'll get into some of them in
2:15.2	some detail a little later on but I'm wondering if you remember how early on at liberty
	...

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