[5] After leaving Scotland, Moraes settled in East London, living and volunteering at Toynbee Hall, an anti-poverty charity, where he was later a Council Member.

[8] Prior to his MEP election, Moraes received recognition[9] as director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, a UK-based independent legal protection NGO founded in 1967 specialising in refugee and migration issues.

[10] At JCWI he helped organise legal challenges in the UK and European Courts[11] succeeding Dame Anne Owers as director in 1992.

[20] The Inquiry and his Report "US NSA surveillance programmes, surveillance bodies in various Member States and their impact on EU citizens' fundamental rights and on transatlantic cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs" , voted in March 2014, was sometimes referred to as the Parliament's "European Digital Bill of Rights" as it looked at human rights and commercial priorities for the EU in the areas of data protection, privacy, surveillance, governance of the internet, extreme content and take-down policy, encryption, and cybercrime.

[22] In July 2014 Moraes was elected chairman of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE Committee) where he chaired EU legislative trilogues including GDPR, and the Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD), and negotiated for the Parliament with third countries on a number of security and data agreements including the EU/US Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (SWIFT).

[23] In 2018 as part of his committee's increasing role in the humanitarian, budgetary and legislative aspects of the refugee crisis, he led delegations to Libya, Niger, Lebanon, and the Greek and Italian reception "hotspots" to improve the EU's response.

He led all-party European Parliament rule of law delegations that year to Poland and Slovakia following the murder there of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak.

[38] Claude Moraes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to human rights,[39] and awarded an honorary doctorate (DUniv) by the University of Greenwich in 2022.