Claude Moraes

Background

Claude Moraes is of Indian descent. He was born in Aden (State of Aden), and grew up in Scotland, having moved to Dundee with his parents at the age of three from India. His parents are Indian Catholics from Karnataka (Mangalore) and Mumbai respectively. He attended the comprehensive St Modan's High School, and studied law at the University of Dundee, government at Birkbeck, University of London and public international law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Previous work

After leaving Scotland, Claude Moraes settled in East London, living and volunteering at Toynbee Hall an anti-poverty charity, where he was later a Council Member and was appointed House of Commons researcher to MPs John Reid and Paul Boateng following the 1987 General Election.

He was appointed a national officer at the TUC at Congress House, London in 1989 and during this period was a representative to the ETUC in Brussels.

Prior to becoming an MEP, he attained a national campaigning and media profile as director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants - a UK-based independent legal NGO founded in 1967 specialising in refugee and migration issues. At JCWI he helped organise key legal challenges in the UK and European Courts. He succeeded Dame Anne Owers as director in 1992. Previous directors of JCWI have included Ian Martin, sometime Secretary General of Amnesty International. At this time he was also executive secretary to the Immigrants' Aid Trust. Moraes was appointed a Commissioner at the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) for the period 1997-2002 while at JCWI. He was also an elected Council member of Liberty during this period.

He has written regularly on migration and human rights issues and is a co-author of the Politics of Migration (Blackwell Publishing) and the JHA chapter of The EU After the Treaty of Lisbon (Cambridge University Press 2012), and was a Tribune columnist.

He contested the parliamentary constituency of Harrow West in the 1992 General Election.

Member of the European Parliament, 1999-present

He was first elected to the European Parliament in the 1999 European elections, one of the first Asian origin MEPs elected to the European Parliament and London's first ethnic minority MEP. He was re-elected to the European Parliament at number one on the Labour Party list in 2004. In 2009, he was number one on the London list of Labour candidates in the European Parliamentary elections, being re-elected to the European Parliament for the third time. He led the London list going into the 2014 European elections and was elected for a fourth term.

Moraes was the elected Spokesperson for the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs from 2009 to 2014. His Parliamentary reports include the legislative Reports on the Protection of Seasonal Workers in the EU (2014) and Blue Card Directive (Revision) (2017).

In 2013 Moraes was appointed Rapporteur (lead) for the Parliament Inquiry into Mass Surveillance following the leaks from Edward Snowden. The Inquiry and his Report "US NSA surveillance programmes, surveillance bodies in various Member States and their impact on EU citizens' fundamental rights and on transatlantic cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs" was approved with a large majority by the EP in March 2014 and is now often referred to as the Parliament's "European Digital Bill of Rights" as it looks at the future of key data, human rights and commercial priorities for the EU in the area of data protection, surveillance, governance of the internet, cybercrime, media freedom, scrutiny, anti-terrorism and technology.

In July 2014 Moraes was elected Chairman of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE Committee).

Recognition

In 2011 Moraes was Dod's and the European Parliament Magazine's 'MEP of the Year' for his work on Justice and Civil Liberties. In 2016 he was named as one of Politico Magazine's "40 MEPs Who Matter".