Ann Clwyd

Ann Clwyd Roberts is a Welsh Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Cynon Valley since 1984. She was previously, from 1979 to 1984, a Member of the European Parliament for Mid and West Wales. She has been the vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group, and chair of INDICT, the campaign to bring Iraqi war criminals to justice. She was appointed in May 2003 to be the Special Envoy to the Prime Minister on Human Rights in Iraq, and has since visited Iraq four times for the prime minister. As a long-time campaigner on human rights in Iraq, she was present in 1991 when thousands of Kurds fled on foot in the mountains of Iran and Iraq from attacks by Saddam Hussein. Clwyd was influential in setting up the Kurdish "safe havens" for the Kurds. She has returned to Iraqi Kurdistan several times since and on one occasion brokered a peace settlement between the two warring sides, which resulted in forty-four Kurds being released from prison. She visited northern Iraq in February 2003 before the outbreak of war, which she supported on humanitarian grounds.