Pope Jeremy - Papers of Jeremy Pope

Jeremy Pope was born in Wellington on the 9th of October 1938, Wellington. He went to school at St. Peter’s, Cambridge and Wanganui Collegiate. In 1963, he graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a Bachelor of Laws, was admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand and married Diana Miller.

Pope had 10 years in private law practice in New Zealand, arguing cases at all levels in the courts and editing the New Zealand Law Journal in the early 1970s. As editor of the New Zealand Law Journal, he campaigned successfully on human rights and Rule of Law issues. Pope was also jointly responsible for instigating the Duty Solicitor scheme in New Zealand. During the 1970s, he was also involved with the ‘Save Manapouri’ environmental movement in NZ (which laid the foundation for continuing civil activism in NZ). He subsequently became involved with a number of human rights NGOs, including the Minority Rights Group, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC), the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and he was founding trustee of London-based NGO, INTERIGHTS.

He and Diana wrote Mobil Travel Guide books for North and South Islands of New Zealand. The first edition was published in 1973, with further editions released throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Together they received the Horwath Sir Jack Newman Award, for outstanding leadership in the tourism industry.

In 1976 they went to London, and Jeremy joined the Commonwealth Secretariat as assistant director of the legal division (he went on to become director in 1980) and editor of the Commonwealth Law Bulletin. He was secretary to the Commonwealth Observers’ Group which oversaw the independence elections in Zimbabwe in 1980, and took part in the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons which was instrumental in securing the eventual release of Nelson Mandela. In November 1993 he was admitted as a Barrister-at-Law, Inner Temple (England).

He left the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1994 to join the newly established Transparency International as its first Managing Director. In that role, in 1995, he was appointed as an anti-corruption adviser to the World Bank President in 1995. In 1998 he moved into an Executive Directorship at the London office of TI, taking responsibility for knowledge management and producing one of TI’s first source books, on which the National Integrity Systems assessment came to be based.

In 2003 he co-founded Tiri (re-named Integrity Action in September 2013) with Fredrik Galtung. The Popes returned to New Zealand in 2006. Jeremy continued to lecture both here and overseas and appeared regularly as a commentator on programmes such as the BBC World Service, CNN, and the Voice of America.

In 2007, Pope was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit by the NZ Government for service to international affairs. He was appointed as a Commissioner on the New Zealand Human Rights Commission in 2008, where he served until his death in August 2012.

The Jeremy Pope Corruption Collection, donated to the JC Beaglehole Room in 2010, encompasses three main areas of Pope’s working life, from 1980 to approximately 2007. The series begin with his involvement with the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1980, through the establishment and development of Transparency International from 1993, and finally include records from his work as a founding member of Tiri in 2003.

Thanks due to: The New Zealand Law Society (https://www.lawsociety.org.nz/news-and-communications/people-in-the-law/obituaries/obituaries-list/jeremy-david-pope-onzm,-1938-2012)

Obituary by Fredrik Galtung in the Guardian, 3 October 2012 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/03/jeremy-pope).