The governing council of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Five Islands Campus has officially announced the upcoming Sir Aziz Fares Hadeed Memorial Lecture, a tribute event honoring the legacy of the late Antiguan and Barbudan business leader, public servant, and former campus council chairman. Scheduled to take place at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, October 30, the keynote address will be delivered by globally celebrated human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson, whose presentation is framed around a rigorous assessment of the Commonwealth’s underutilized political capacity to advance human rights, regional equity, and cross-national cooperation across its 54 member states. The memorial lecture series was established to pay lasting tribute to Sir Aziz Fares Hadeed, who was a foundational pillar of the UWI Five Islands Campus from its official launch in 2019. Appointed as the campus’ inaugural council chairman on August 1 of that same year, Hadeed led the institution’s governing body through its critical early developmental phase, laying structural and strategic groundwork to expand accessible tertiary education for learners across the Eastern Caribbean. Hadeed’s decades-long career spanned both private sector leadership and high-impact public service across Antigua and Barbuda and the wider Caribbean region. He took the helm of the family-owned Hadeed Group of Companies as chairman in 1980, later steered regional carrier LIAT as its board chair between 1995 and 1998, and played a central role in founding the Antigua Power Company in 1996. His public service tenure included two terms as an independent senator, followed by a cabinet minister post held from 2004 to 2006. After Hadeed passed away in May of this year, UWI Vice Chancellor Sir Hilary Beckles issued a public statement praising his extraordinary contributions to the university’s governance infrastructure, his unwavering advocacy for expanded educational opportunities for marginalized young people, and his lifelong commitment to philanthropic action and advancing social justice across the Caribbean. Geoffrey Robertson, the event’s featured speaker, brings unparalleled professional authority to the lecture topic as the founding head of London’s prestigious Doughty Street Chambers, a leading global human rights legal practice. Over his decades-long career, Robertson has argued landmark constitutional, criminal, and human rights cases before high courts across the Commonwealth and Europe, served as the first president of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and earned international acclaim as the author of seminal legal text *Crimes Against Humanity*. His most transformative Caribbean legal victory came via the historic *Pratt and Morgan v. Attorney General of Jamaica* case, in which he successfully advocated for a Privy Council ruling that barred the execution of prisoners who had endured prolonged stays on death row. The precedent-setting decision ultimately led to the commutation of hundreds of death sentences across the entire Caribbean region, fundamentally reforming capital punishment jurisprudence across multiple Commonwealth member states.
Memorial lecture honouring Sir Aziz Hadeed to examine Commonwealth’s political potential
