Joel Joffe, Baron Joffe
British lawyer (1932–2017)
Joel Goodman Joffe, Baron Joffe, (12 May 1932 – 18 June 2017) was a South African-born British lawyer and Labour peer in the House of Lords.
Early life and education
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to the Joffe family. His mother was born in Mandatory Palestine and his father was born in Lithuania, Joffe grew up in a Jewish household before being sent to a Catholic boarding school. He was educated at the University of Witwatersrand (BCom, LLB 1955).
Career
He worked as a human rights lawyer 1958–65, including as defence attorney of the leadership of the ANC at the 1963-4 Rivonia Trial, helping to represent Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants.
He married the artist Vanetta Pretorius in 1962 and moved with her to the United Kingdom in 1965 after being refused entry to Australia as he was considered "undesirable". Once in the UK he worked in the financial services industry, setting up Hambro Life Assurance with Sir Mark Weinberg, as well as in the voluntary sector.
Joffe chaired the Swindon and Marlborough Health Authority and the Ridgeway Hospital and was a member of The Royal Commission on the Care of the Elderly. He was associated with Oxfam in various roles between 1982 and 2001, including being its Chair 1995–2001. He was a trustee of many different charities and actively pursued a range of charitable activities through the Joffe Charitable Trust which he set up with his wife Vanetta in 1968.
“Joel Joffe, Baron Joffe” enters the record as british lawyer (1932–2017). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joel, Joffe and Baron can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q336118. VIAF identifies the subject as 220997044. The Library of Congress control number is n97049990. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 2017, 1955 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joel Joffe, Baron Joffe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.