Baroness Chakrabarti: 'I am disappointed by my fellow children of migrants'

Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti talks to Sienna Rodgers about putting forward the case for human rights, why Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman have broken her heart, and her view on the "appalling" briefing against Diane Abbott

Shami Chakrabarti made her name when she was appointed director of human rights pressure group Liberty aged 34. For stretches of time in that role, which she held for 13 years, she was rarely off our screens. With her signature look – black clothes, pearl necklace, short hair – she was immediately recognisable as the most fierce and eloquent critic of New Labour’s controversial anti-terror measures.

Now a Labour peer, in recent years Baroness Chakrabarti has taken up a similar role in the House of Lords, being consistently at the forefront of fights between peers and the government over human rights – most notably on the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. So concerned was she about the direction of travel under the Conservatives that she wrote a new book defending the very concept of these rights – Human Rights: The Case for the Defence, published by Penguin in May.

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“I am personally disappointed by my fellow children of migrants and the way they have turned their rhetoric and their wrath on the most desperate people on Earth, including in small boats,” Chakrabarti says in a withering attack on Tory front benchers who share her British Asian background.

“What breaks my heart about Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman is they know better because they are the children of migrants like me, and therefore like me they must have sat around the kitchen table and the