Press Release: The University of Buckingham Honours Baroness Helena Kennedy and Lord Lawson

23 February 2011

23 February 2011

Honorary Degrees to be Awarded on 25 & 26 February 2011

Lord Tanlaw, Chancellor of The University of Buckingham, will confer Honorary Degrees on the following at the graduation ceremonies to be held on 25 and 26 February at the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, in Buckingham:

Baroness Helena Kennedy (Doctor of Laws)
Mr Anthony Green (Doctor of the University)
Professor Len Evans (Doctor of the University)
Lord Lawson of Blaby (Doctor of Science)

For further details on each of our Honorary Graduands please see Notes to Editors, below.

At the first ceremony beginning at 15:00 on Friday 25, Baroness Helena Kennedy will have her degree conferred upon her.

Mr Anthony Green will have his degree conferred upon him at the second ceremony, held on Saturday 26, beginning at 11:30.

Professor Len Evans and Lord Lawson of Blaby will have their degree’s conferred upon them at the third ceremony, held on Saturday 26, beginning at 15:00.

Notes to Editors:

Baroness Helena Kennedy is a barrister, broadcaster, and Labour member of the House of Lords. She is an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues and chair of Justice – the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists.

As a barrister she was involved in many of the most prominent cases of the last 30 years including the Brighton Bombing, the Michael Bettany espionage trial, the Guildford Four appeal and the bombing of the Israeli embassy. She was the British member of the recent International Bar Association Task Force on Terrorism and chaired an inquiry for the RCP and the RCP and CH into sudden infant death, in the aftermath of miscarriages of justice where mothers were wrongly convicted of murdering their babies. As a life peer she participates in the House of Lords on issues concerned with human rights, civil liberties, social justice and culture.

Professor Len Evans studied Botany and Marine Biology at the University of Wales Bangor, where he obtained a PhD. From there he moved to Leeds University, where he led a large research group funded by the research councils and industry to study plant biochemistry.

During his time in Leeds he successfully supervised 26 PhD students and published some 200 peer reviewed research papers. For this work he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Wales Cardiff in1977. Len Evans joined The University of Buckingham as Professor of Life Sciences in 1992, and in 2004 took on the role of Registrar where he set up of collaborations between the University and other higher education institutions worldwide, notably with the European School of Economics.

Mr Anthony Green was born in 1939 and studied at the Slade School of Art, where he won the Henry Tonks Prize for drawing in 1960. This was followed by the Gulbenkian Purchase Award in 1963 and the Harkness Fellowship in the USA from 1967-69. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1971, served as a Trustee between 2000-2008, was the Featured Artist at the 2003 Summer Exhibition and is currently Chairman of the RA’s Exhibitions Committee. He is a Fellow of University College, London.

Public collections owning Green’s work include (among many others) the Tate Gallery, V & A, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Setagaya Museum, Tokyo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has had over 100 one-man shows worldwide since 1962. To celebrate the Millennium, his pictorial sculpture, Resurrection, was shown in 15 UK cathedrals.

Nigel Lawson, Lord Lawson of Blaby became a Conservative MP in 1974 after a number of years in journalism, including the editorship of The Spectator from 1966-1970. He served in the Thatcher government from 1979 to 1989 as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Secretary of State for Energy, and, from 1983, as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister), in which capacity he introduced a thoroughgoing programme of tax reform and led the Thatcher government’s pioneering privatisation programme. He entered the House of Lords in 1992.

He has written a number of books, including his political memoirs (The View from Number 11) and, most recently, the best-selling An Appeal to Reason; A Cool Look at Global Warming. An abridged version of his memoirs, with a new concluding chapter, was published in October 2010 under the title Memoirs of a Tory Radical.

In November 2009 he founded a new think-tank, The Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org).