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My friend Neville Linton, who has died aged 92, was an elegant and intelligent man, a connoisseur of rum, jazz and cricket and an avid participant in Trinidad carnival. He was also an expert in international relations who had a distinguished and varied career in that field, including more than a decade of service in the senior ranks of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London.
In the 1960s and 70s he lectured in political science at the University of Alberta in Canada. In 1965 he was invited by the Commonwealth secretary general, Arnold Smith (a Canadian), to help set up the first Commonwealth heads of government meeting. In 1968 he migrated to Trinidad, where he worked first for the nascent Institute of International Relations as a senior lecturer and then as a researcher for the Caribbean Council of Churches from 1978 to 1982.
In 1983 he came to London to take up a senior post in the political division of the Commonwealth Secretariat, where one of his main tasks was to guide the secretariat’s work on trying to put an end to apartheid. He was also involved in the development of guidelines for Commonwealth election observer missions that were adopted in 1991, and organised observer groups in Malaysia, Namibia, Bangladesh and Kenya until his retirement in 1995.
Neville was born in Georgetown in British Guiana (now Guyana) to Oscar, a carpenter, and Winifred Avery, a seamstress. At Queen’s College Georgetown he shone at the arts, and from 1954 until 1958 he studied economics at McGill University in Montreal. He was the first black student to become editor of one of the main student newspapers, and as a debater he helped the McGill team win the 1957 MIT debating conference. He went on to study international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston in the US.
Although Neville remained in the UK until his death, Guyana never left him, surfacing particularly in preparations for Christmas, with the soaking of fruit for black cake beginning in October, the making of ponche a creme in November and then garlic pork and pepperpot in December. He was a founder member of the UK wing of the Queens College of Guyana Association.
In retirement Neville was a senior adviser to Transparency International, developing standards to prevent corruption in countries as diverse as Georgia, the Bahamas, Eritrea and Nigeria. He became involved with a number of human rights organisations and served for many years on the executive committee of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and on the boards of InterRights and Tourism Concern.
He is survived by his wife, Lesley Roberts, a British woman whom he married in 1986 after they had met in 1979 while she was working in the Caribbean for Oxfam. She survives him, as do his sons, Callum and Mark.
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