Emily Thornberry @EmilyThornberry is Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury and shadow foreign secretary. She studied Law at the University of Kent before practising as a barrister from 1985 to 2005, specialising in human rights law under the guidance of Michael Mansfield. She was first elected to Parliament in 2005.

When I was starting out as a barrister in the 1980s, Lord Denningwas the most famous judge in the land, and the supposed role model for every lawyer. But not for me.

Not when I was busy defending men already living in fear of HIV and gay-bashing, forced to conduct their sex lives in secret and then victimised for so-called “gross indecency” when caught doing so, in a culture of intimidation created by the likes of Denning.

In 1986, he was one of 13 peers who rose to spout horrific homophobic abuse in support of Lord Halsbury’s bill to stop local councils “promoting homosexuality”, a proposal that led directly to the infamous section 28.

Denning boasted of jailing men for “the abominable offence of buggery”, and warned that “we must not allow this cult of homosexuality, making it equal with heterosexuality, to develop in our land.”

It took LGBT activists 15 years to defeat section 28, but this is not a movement that’s afraid of the long struggle. They know all progress is hard-fought, that discrimination against any individual anywhere is discrimination against all, and that the campaign for true, global equality must therefore be won one issue, case and country at a time. And I hope Lord Denning is spinning in his grave today. Not just because it is Pride weekend, but because, across the world, it is now judges like him in the vanguard of that fight for LGBT equality. Indeed, when it comes to promoting and protecting LGBT rights worldwide, I believe no battle matters more right now than the demand for judicial independence and the rule of law. Read more via the Guardian