About a month ago, CLAUDE MORAES became the first Asian ever to enter the European Parliament. Yet, notwithstanding the Age of Internet, the achievement of this statesman, who traces his Goan roots to Utorda in Salcete, largely went unnoticed.


Advocate Moraes was the chairman of the Labour Party Immigration Cell in the UK and the party candidate during the last elections. Today Moraes is the sole Asian in a almost wholly white European Parliament.

Claude Moraes was director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, England’s only independent national organization working on immigration, asylum and European migration matters.

After graduating in law, he was researcher to the Rt’ Hon Dr John Reid, MP and then a national policy officer at the British Trades Union Congress, where he was also on the European TUC's Equal Rights Committee.

He was appointed as a Campaign for Racial Equality Commissioner in 1998. He is a trustee of the East London Charity Toynbee Hall, and a council member of Liberty and Charter 88.

The Commission for Racial Equality defines itself as a group working for a just society, which gives everyone an equal chance to learn, work and live free from discrimination and prejudice, and from the fear of racial harassment and violence.

Over recent years, Moraes has come across as a champion of the rights of immigrants into the UK. Recently, he told British MPs that immigrants deprived of benefits, while appealing under the Government's new asylum proposals, would be "starved out of the country".

Objecting to the cuts, Moraes said, "People should be allowed to appeal, rather than be starved out of the country." He said that he wanted ministers to explain what would happen to asylum seekers prevented from claiming benefit.

Claiming that ministers were intending to move towards a system of internal immigration controls, he pointed out that the Home Office had already said that people using the National Health Service (NHS), schools or applying to benefit agencies, would have to show their passports.

Recently, Britain announced plans to train staff in Job Centres and benefit offices in how to spot illegal immigrants under new measures announced by Michael Howard, the Home Secretary. The proposals were immediately condemned as "dangerous and divisive" by Claude Moraes, director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

In April, when a bomb rocked the centre of London's Bangladeshi community - a week after a similar device blew up in Brixton, Claude Moraes protested, "I think that there will be a call for the police to step up their efforts to catch the perpetrators. The effect of this will be a shock in the community and the terror that has been caused is unacceptable."

Police said this, and the Brixton nail bomb attack, were racially motivated. An extreme right-wing group, Combat 18, has said it carried out the Brick Lane attack. Four racist groups claimed responsibility for the Brixton bombing.

When the British racist politician Enoch Powell died at the age of 85 recently, Moraes said that Powell had appealed to the “lowest common denominator" in his rivers of blood speech and had been proved wrong by history.

Across the whole of the European Union, Britain was the only country where there was any black or Asian candidates standing for election. Moraes was second in Labour's list of candidates in the London region and was thus almost certain to gain a place in the parliament under the proportional representation system.

At he last UK General Election he was given a pretty hopeless constituency to fight, and lost as expected. Moraes was one of the four Labour candidates elected from London along with Pauline Green, Robert Evans and Richard Balfe.

Frederick Noronha