Obituary - Lord Joffe, human rights lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela

Died: June 18, 2017

JOEL Joffe, Lord Joffe of Liddington, who has died aged 85, was a human rights lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela during the notorious Rivonia Trial in South Africa which led to the imprisonment of Mandela for 27 years. Later, Lord Joffe made his name as a pioneer of corporate giving and philanthropy - he gave away an estimated two-thirds of his wealth - and as a Labour peer in the House of Lords, campaigned repeatedly for the introduction into British law of a right to die.

He was born in Johannesburg and had a tough education at a Catholic school in the city. He recalled that the monks who ran the school were extremely fond of physical education but the young Joffe started a competition with his friends to see who could receive the most beatings. At over a hundred, Joffe was declared the winner and the headmaster gave up. Beating, he told Joffe, was wasted on him.

After school, Joffe studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand, but left his first firm when they objected to him working pro bono on human rights cases. He was called to the South African bar in 1962.

The trial of Mandela and nine other ANC activists came the following year, with Mandela himself firmly in charge of the defence. While preparing for the case, lawyer and client knew that the room would be bugged so devised a system where they would write messages on bits of paper which they would then burn in an ashtray.

Mandela saw the trial itself as an opportunity to expose the government for its human rights abuses and insisted he would plead not guilty to the charges of sabotage. He delivered a speech which lasted for several hours during which the country's future president insisted that political freedoms would come to South Africa one day. He also said he was willing to die for his ideal.

In the end, Mandela and his co-accused were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment - he was released in 1990. For Joffe, the trial meant that he was shunned by many colleagues and friends and eventually he was banned from the country for 30 years and forced to start a new life and career in Britain.

Unable to practise as a lawyer, he joined Abbey Life Assurance and later co-founded Allied Dunbar, now Zurich. He also established the Allied Dunbar Trust, which gave one per cent of the company's profits to good causes. He was also chairman of Oxfam from 1995 to 2001, where he “was tireless in helping to make Oxfam more effective and providing the best return on donors’ contributions”, the charity said.

He was appointed CBE in 1999 and made a life peer in 2000. Between 2002 and 2006, he made several attempts to introduce the right to euthanasia into British law. "Some people do not want palliative care," he said. "They say: 'I have had a good life and I don't want to spend the last three to four months of my life suffering unbearably or being drugged. It is my right to determine how and when I die.'"

Lord Joffe is survived by his wife Vanetta and their three daughters.