Patricia Scotland, Baroness Scotland of Asthal

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Patricia Janet Scotland, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, PC, QC (born 19 August 1955) is a barrister and a minister in the British Government.

1 Early life
2 Career advancement
3 Government
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Early life

Scotland was born in Dominica, but her family moved to Walthamstow when she was three. She was one of twelve children. She was educated at London University where she earned her law degree in 1976. She then studied at the Middle Temple and was Called to the Bar in 1977, specialising in family and children's law. In 1991 she was the first black woman to be made a Queen's Counsel. She took pride in recalling that she had been encouraged, while at school, to get a job in J Sainsbury's supermarket.

[edit] Career advancement

She was a speaker at the 'Women of the Year' Luncheon in October 1993; her speech claiming that there was a male way and a female way to work in a profession was criticised as superficial by the journalist Anne McElvoy. Early in 1997 she was named as a Bencher of the Middle Temple. Scotland was named as a Millennium Commissioner on February 17, 1994, and was a member of the Commission for Racial Equality. The Lord Chancellor in the Conservative government had intended to make Scotland a High Court Judge, but in the event she received a life peerage as Baroness Scotland of Asthal, of Asthal in the County of Oxfordshire, on a Labour Party list of working peers in 1997. However, her continued legal work led to a low attendance record in the House of Lords. Among other things she headed an inquiry into a murder committed by a psychiatric patient.

[edit] Government

In a government reshuffle in 1999, Scotland was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She was responsible for the British overseas territories, and also relations with Southern Asian countries. She was responsible for introducing the Bill to ratify the International Criminal Court in the United Kingdom. She also established a panel of British-based lawyers who gave their time on a pro bono basis to United Kingdom nationals imprisoned in foreign countries. In 2001 rumours placed her as a possible appointee to the post of Lord Chancellor, but instead she became Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department, and was made a member of the Privy Council. Scotland was a contender for a cabinet position again in 2003, when Tony Blair reportedly considered appointing her Leader of the House of Lords ^[1].

In 2003, Lady Scotland of Asthal was made Minister of State for the Criminal Justice system and Law Reform at the Home Office. A new extradition treaty with the United States of America had been signed on March 31, 2003. Scotland had the responsibility for passing the necessary legislation through the House of Lords, while terrorism was not primary in the treaty's definition by implication and comment it got an easy ride through both houses, according to some commentators and senior MPs such as Iain Duncan Smith ^[2]. In 2004 Scotland was suggested as a possible appointee as a Commissioner of the European Union.

The 'NatWest Three' case directly connected to the treaty and by default to Scotland's role is unusual in that the offence the three have been charged with are not typically extradition offences. The three men are all British citizens, worked and lived in the UK for the Bank Of Scotland and the NatWest Bank, both British banks. The UK ratified the UK/US extradition treaty of 2003 while the US has still to bring the legislation into law. On 12 July 2006, in a highly unusual move, the Speaker of the House, Michael Martin, allowed an emergency debate on both the treaty and the 'NatWest Three' after a request by Liberal Democrat frontbencher Nick Clegg. During the debate Lady Scotland of Asthal's view in 2005 that a higher threshold to establish 'probable cause' was required by the UK to extradite from the US than vice-versa was contrasted by Clegg to comments the Prime Minister had made in July 2006 in which he stated that the evidential burdens on the two countries were the same ^[3].