A real privilege to be asked to write about my beloved friend Jonny for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
JONNY – Jonathan Paul – COOPER, barrister and human rights campaigner, was born at Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport, Cheshire, on 22 September 1962, the only son and youngest of three children of Peter Cooper (1936–2010), a lecturer in clinical psychology at Manchester University, and his wife, Jacqueline (Jackie), née French (1937–2016), who had trained as a schoolteacher. At the time of his birth the family lived at 2 Norris Hill, Stockport. Jackie and Peter shared a love of psychology and had known each other since their schooldays in north London. In 1968 they co-created Cooper Research and Marketing (CRAM), initially based in Manchester but from 1970 with an office in Wimpole Street, London. CRAM was credited with pioneering the use of qualitative research, especially focus groups, and novel psychological approaches in market research. It became CRAM International in 1986 when Jackie moved to New York following their amicable divorce.
The rapid growth and success of the business had taken the family to London, with a move to new offices as well as a family home at 53 St Martin’s Lane, central London, in 1972. A year later, the Coopers bought Higher Tideford Farm, near Totnes in Devon. After a stint at the local comprehensive, Jonny Cooper went to nearby Dartington Hall School. He adored Dartington and was outraged that the school closed in 1987, denying future children the eccentric outdoors, progressive education that he loved. The Cooper family were as alternative as the school, enjoying a life split between Devon and London, with sisters Diana and Helen recalling being driven to school in their vintage Rolls Royce, Jasmine, watching the country lanes whizz past through holes in the floor.
After a brief stint studying psychology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, Cooper took a history degree at the University of Kent, Canterbury; he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2013. His first job, in 1987, was as HIV/AIDS co-ordinator at the Haemophilia Society. When he joined the society’s tiny team, he found himself at the heart of some of the toughest challenges of the early AIDS crisis, deftly navigating tensions brewing between groups that the media characterized as ‘innocent victims’ and the (allegedly) guilty gay men who were the majority of people with AIDS. Through this work, and early efforts to secure compensation for those infected with HIV through health sector negligence, he found a love for human rights and the law.
In 1990 Cooper worked with the newly formed National AIDS Trust to build a coalition of non-governmental organizations working to deal with the crisis and drafted a ‘UK Declaration of rights for people with HIV and AIDS’. He got into the gritty detail of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention that was inspired by it, and went back to London’s City University to retrain in the law. On his first day at bar school, in October 1991, he met the writer and art historian Kevin Childs, and with his unstoppable enthusiasm for life, fell in love immediately. It was a slightly slower burn for Kevin, but soon they were living together, sealing their relationship in a civil partnership in 2008. In 2016 they moved back to Devon where they rented an exquisite National Trust property in the grounds of Coleton Fishacre. They would regularly plunge into the chilly waters of the River Dart, in the grounds of Cooper’s old school, swimming ‘together like a pair of dolphins’, according to his pupil master Edward Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald was founding head of the progressive Doughty Street Chambers and described Cooper’s pupillage as one of ‘adventure and discovery. He loved life and he loved people’. Cooper was someone ‘ubiquitous in his influence, and in his championship of the victims of oppression, persecution and discrimination’. Among their earliest cases were advocacy for what Cooper came to frame as victims of ‘arbitrary detention’: a man (Stanley Johnson) detained for over nine years in Rampton top security hospital without a real diagnosis of mental illness, and a fifteen-year-old (Prem Singh) sentenced to detention too young. Cooper was unrelenting in his advocacy, pursuing these difficult cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and lauded for his campaigning against the unjust treatment of juvenile offenders.
The power of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) became a cornerstone of Cooper’s career. In 1995 he represented Graeme Grady, one of three people dismissed from the RAF because they were gay. Cooper was committed to working on cases of LGBTQ+ discrimination, including some of the earliest cases regarding the rights of transgender people, but it would be a mistake to define him solely as a gay rights lawyer. Grady’s case woke him up to the importance of locating human rights, and the ECHR in particular, in British law. There was no doubt that the judge, Simon Brown, saw the deep inequity of the situation, opening his High Court judgment with the words, ‘Lawrence of Arabia would not be welcome in today’s armed forces’. Showing great sympathy for the appellants, he noted that the policy preventing lesbian and gay officers from serving could not be allowed to continue but that he could not find in their favour, arguing that it was the ‘duty’ of the courts ‘to remain within their constitutional bounds and not trespass beyond them’.
After this Cooper saw clearly that until the ECHR was incorporated into British law then the constitutional restraints of the law meant that human rights could not achieve primacy. The dry formalities of the courtroom were already a poor fit for his ebullient spirit and he found himself more drawn to public policy, becoming a legal researcher for the Institute for Public Policy Research, legal director of the civil rights group Liberty, and head of the human rights project at legal reform organization Justice. Cooper was quietly proud of having helped to shape the 1998 Human Rights Act through his deep research and unstinting lobbying. Once the act was signed into law by the new Labour government he pivoted his energies from research to training, ensuring that the act’s provisions were turned into action by educating civil servants, judges, and tribunal chairs on the implications of the legislation. With colleagues from Doughty Street and other progressive chambers he held regular seminars and trainings, including for Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomats, and, with the Slynn Foundation, trained members of the armed services and judges in Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Belarus, and several African countries. His passion for life and justice were wide-ranging and he was appointed OBE in 2007 for services to human rights. As director of education and training for the Bingham Centre (2011–12) Cooper expanded his love of training lawyers and experts in human rights and the rule of law in the UK and far beyond. Ever fearless, his trip to St Petersburg was memorable not only because of his utter determination that the hotel should provide a double bed for him and Kevin, but also for the fact that his training sessions provoked such strong reactions that Vladimir Putin’s office ordered the course to be cancelled.
Cooper’s passion for the law was eclectic and he applied his legal training and sharp mind wherever he detected that inequity and injustice was rife, but he retained a core commitment to tackling discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. The first openly gay member of Doughty Street Chambers, he created ‘OUT-y Street’, organizing regular seminars, nudging his colleagues to become fierce allies, and delighting in recruiting and inspiring young LGBTQ+ lawyers. With Tim Otty he co-founded the Human Dignity Trust in 2011, serving as director for six years, with Otty as chair. The organization challenged the criminalization of gay sex throughout the Commonwealth, with notable successes in many countries such as Jamaica where they took a challenge to the Inter-American Court, using the power of the Jamaican constitution to overturn antihomosexuality legislation. At the time of his death Cooper was campaigning for the right to marry for a lesbian couple in the Cayman Islands; working with Helena Kennedy and the Ozanne Foundation on a legal framework for a bill banning ‘conversion therapies’ (which attempt to change an individual’s sexual orientation); and conducting a passionate campaign against the arbitrary detention of the leader of the Biafran people in southern Nigeria—with whom he achieved an almost cult status.
Ever the internationalist, Cooper’s commitment to Europe was especially fierce. He was editor of the European Human Rights Law Review from 2000 and a special edition in his memory was published in February 2022. Enraged by Brexit, he saw the opportunity for a campaign, and, with Kevin, founded the Totnes City State in 2016. They nailed a proclamation of the city state to the door of the town’s medieval guildhall, declaring an oath of allegiance and issuing EU Totnes City State passports bearing the image of the founder of Totnes, Prince Brutus of Troy. Cooper brought passion and a serious message about the importance of Europe—and especially the ECHR—which he clung on to until his final days.
Jonny Cooper was a true bohemian, motivated by truth, beauty, freedom, and love in his professional and personal life—and never a sharp distinction between the two. He studied hard as he converted to the law and ate his dinners in Gray’s Inn, and partied just as hard. The CRAM family office was ideally located and became the site of many a wild and long evening. Handily close to Two Brydges Place—the club that served as his favourite plotting and drinking haunt—many colleagues would later reminisce about carving out fine legal strategy over a bottle or three of fine burgundy. His parties were equally unforgettable, bringing together an eclectic mix of artists, activists, and of course lawyers. One of his closest friends at Doughty Street Chambers recounted taking his new girlfriend (soon his wife) to one of these ‘notorious parties’. Cooper held her hand and took her into the front room to dance; ‘I followed through about twenty minutes later’, recalled Sir Keir Starmer, ‘to find Jonny standing on a glass coffee table, throwing Vic in the air and catching her’.
On 10 October 2021 a similarly eclectic mix of friends, colleagues, and family gathered in shock for Cooper’s funeral at the exquisite riverside St Petrox Church in Dartmouth, following his death from a heart attack on 18 September. Starmer gave the eulogy, recalling his friend’s mischief and ebullience, and more reflections followed from friends, family, and lawyers and friends, with dancing and speeches until long after midnight in the medieval great hall at Dartington. A more restrained memorial service was held in the OBE chapel of St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 February 2022.
Cooper had been busy lobbying to set up a professorship in LGBTQ+ history at the time of his death. Five months later, the Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities was established at Oxford University, hosted by Mansfield College and watched over by its principal, Helen Mountfield, Cooper’s friend and fellow human rights lawyer. The first fully endowed professorship of its kind in the UK, the Cooper chair was made possible by a £4.9 million gift from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, with whom Cooper was holidaying at their estate in Corrour, Scotland, at the time of his death. He had also been friends with Sigrid Rausing, bringing ‘an energetic and passionate presence’ to the board of her human rights-focused trust for six years, from 2012. She established an annual lecture series at Mansfield College in his name.