David Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir

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David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe, 1st Earl of Kilmuir GCVO PC KC (* 29. May 1900 in Edinburgh , Scotland ; † 27. January 1967 ) was a British lawyer , politician of the Conservative Party and longtime Lord Chancellor .

biography

After visiting the George Watson's College , he studied at Balliol College of Oxford University .

He began his political career as a candidate for the Conservative Party in 1935 with the first election to the House of Commons . There he represented the constituency of Liverpool West Derby for nearly twenty years until 1954 .

In 1942 he was appointed Solicitor General for England and Wales and was in office as such until 1945. At the same time he was knighted in 1942 ( Knight Bachelor ), so that from then on he carried the title Sir . In 1945 he was Attorney General for England and Wales for some time .

In 1945 in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals , he was a member of the prosecutor's staff and thus one of Hartley Shawcross's staff .

At the European congress of the European unification movement in May 1948 he called for binding norms for the protection of human rights and thus contributed to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) , which was signed in 1950 and came into force in 1953. During this time he was a reporter in the International Legal Committee headed by Pierre-Henri Teitgen .

After the election victory of the Tories in the British House of Commons elections on October 25, 1951 he was appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the Minister of the Interior ( Home Secretary ) in the cabinet, which he belonged to the 1954th In this capacity, he rejected a request from Queen Elizabeth II. For pardon of Derek Bentley which was adopted on 28 January 1953 executed was. Forty years later, he was pardoned posthumously and the death sentence overturned another five years later.

In 1953 he was accepted into the Royal Victorian Order as the Knight Grand Cross .

After his departure from the House of Commons and the government, he was raised to the hereditary nobility of the Peerage of the United Kingdom on October 19, 1954 with the title Viscount Kilmuir , of Creich in the County of Sutherland, and from then on belonged to the House of Lords as a member on.

At the same time he became Lord Chancellor in 1954 and held this office until 1962. He was also Rector of the University of St Andrews , the oldest university in Scotland, between 1955 and 1958 .

Maxwell Fyfe, who was also a member of the prestigious London Carlton Club , was elevated to Earl of Kilmuir and Baron Fyfe of Dornoch , of Dornoch in the County of Sutherland on July 20, 1962, after his tenure as Lord Chancellor ended . His titles of nobility expired on his death because he had no male descendants.

literature

Web links

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