Lord McNair – ExoTech bio

During the early part of Duncan McNair’s life, he worked in construction and later specialised in woodcraft, working green timber using traditional tools. In 1990 he inherited the title Lord McNair of Gleniffer from his father, the second Baron McNair but continued with woodworking part time until 1995 after which time he attended the House of Lords on full time basis.

As a hereditary member of the House of Lords from 1990 until the passing of the House of Lords Reform Act in 1999, Lord McNair foreshadowed his current work on human rights by contributing to debates on health, international development and the environment, having made his maiden speech during the Second Reading of the Environmental Protection Bill of 1990.

Since having to leave the House of Lords after the House of Lords Reform Act of 1999, Duncan McNair has been working in the field of government communications/public relations.

In the early 2000s, knowing that education is the key to development, Duncan took a team of instructors to Khartoum, Sudan where they delivered a pilot project on Learning How To Learn training to university lecturers from five different universities. This has since been expanded by others who picked up on the benefits of this training and took it to other countries.

For the past four years, in addition to his commercial work, Duncan has been developing a program organizing human rights education for speakers of Middle Eastern languages which is generating projects in Iraq, Kurdistan and Pakistan. In the UK, Peaceful Planet Human Rights Education (www.peaceful-planet.org) has conducted more than 165 human rights education workshops in four languages. The programme is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the website has downloadable educational materials on the Universal Declaration in Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Turkish and Urdu. Duncan contributed significantly to the project management of this very large translation project.

Current projects for Peaceful Planet include collaboration with the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq and a Kurdish NGO working with the UN presence in Iraq on human rights education for police, security officials and teachers, as well as other humanitarian projects. Another project is working with United Nations Association of Pakistan to expand human rights education and other programmes to people and government agencies there.

Duncan is developing a business to supply good quality and comfortable temporary accommodation for the homeless to local authorities and housing associations at greatly reduced cost to the local authority. Currently the UK has 60,000 homeless people so the project aligns with his experience and his social goals.