Cedric Thornberry

Cedric Henry Reid Thornberry (22 June 1936 – 6 May 2014) was an international lawyer and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations, for which he worked for 17 years. He spent most of his United Nations service in international peace keeping in Cyprus, the Middle East, ex-Yugoslavia and Somalia.

Thornberry was born in Belfast, where he attended Finaghy Primary School and the Methodist College. He studied law at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and graduated first with a BA and then with an LLB and became a barrister in 1959. Thornberry taught at Cambridge University from 1958, and at the London School of Economics from 1960. He was a foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Greece and was a practising human rights lawyer. He was one of the founders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1968. In the 1970s he represented many applicants at the European Court of Human Rights. He was the father of Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry.

He stood for the Labour Party in Guildford in 1966.