In 2009, he renounced a peerage (life membership of the House of Lords) in protest at UK premier David Cameron's withdrawal from the Centrist EPP Group.

After losing his seat as an MEP he became active in campaigning against Brexit and coordinates the largest pro EU forum in the UK.

[2] The new group was described by Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg as "a bunch of nutters, homophobes, anti-Semites and climate change deniers".

This was the stakeholder forum for the Grassroots Coordinating Group[10] set up by former MPs Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry to argue for a second referendum on Brexit and is closely linked to the European Movement.

That same weekend, the ten DUP (Northern Irish) MPs decided to back the campaign, thereby creating a parliamentary majority.

[15][16][17][18] McMillan-Scott was leader of the British Conservative MEPs between September 1997 and December 2001, and attended the Shadow Cabinet on European issues.

[citation needed] After re-election in 2012 he continued with the democracy and human rights portfolio and additionally the Sakharov Prize Network and transatlantic relations.

He founded the regular forum between the Human Rights and Democracy Network, more than 40 Brussels-based NGOs, and the European Parliament, whose aim is to maximise EU attention to these topics.

He sat on the Supervisory Group which oversees all the European Parliament's democracy and human rights activities, including election observation.

Previous winners are Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Manfred Nowak, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, McMillan-Scott founded the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR),[25] to facilitate the development of democracy and civil society in the ex-Soviet bloc countries, and which is now directed towards the reforming Arab world and countries resisting reform such as China, Cuba and Russia.

As a frequent visitor to countries of the former Soviet Bloc and its satellites after his election in 1984, where he had contacts with dissidents, McMillan-Scott was arrested and fined in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1972 for visiting former religious institutions while working as a tour guide.

He was present during the October 1993 attempted coup d'état by old guard communists against President Boris Yeltsin and was the only outside politician to speak at Garry Kasparov's July 2006 "Other Russia" rally.

This culminated in a barrage of denunciations after the Russian takeover of the Crimea in 2014, and a rigorous set of sanctions against the Putin regime, in which McMillan-Scott played a leading role in Brussels.

McMillan-Scott successfully nominated Hu Jia for the 2008 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Expression, awarded annually by the European Parliament.

In November 2010 he met the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, co-designer of Beijing's Birds Nest stadium, who made a highly-critical series of comments for McMillan-Scott's YouTube channel.

He has argued for an Impunity Index to be maintained by the International Criminal Court, based on the West German Salzgitter Process during the Cold War, where anonymous denunciations of crimes against humanity in totalitarian states may later lead to prosecutions.

He wrote a key report for the European Parliament's foreign affairs select committee, of which he was at one time the longest-serving member, on a new EU–China strategy in 1997.

[29][30] Following subsequent visits to China and pre-Olympic crackdowns he initiated a campaign aimed at an EU political boycott of the August 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

[32] In October 2006, McMillan-Scott visited Cuba, where he met Sakharov prize winners, the "Ladies in White", and the late Oswaldo Payá, as well as other dissidents.

[33][38] In 2012 he stated, "I am absolutely convinced that over a long period from 1999 onwards, organ harvesting from prisoners has been taking place, especially of Falun Gong".

[40][41][42][43] McMillan-Scott, a relation of T. E. Lawrence through the latter's father, Sir Thomas Chapman Bt, has campaigned for reform across the Arab world since a visit to Jordan in 1993.

He championed Egypt's liberal El Ghad party from 2003, and secured the release of its leader, Dr Ayman Nour, after he was imprisoned for standing against former President Mubarak in 2005.

[citation needed] France has an identical system but other countries, including the UK, rely on a patchwork of police schemes and children's charities.

After a report by a panel of independent Wise Men, the commission was later accused of serious irregularities, nepotism and allegations of fraud leading to the resignation of President Jacques Santer and all his commissioners in 1999.

A long-term campaigner for reform of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, in June 2011 McMillan-Scott invited Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to Brussels to internationalise the super-chef's Fish Fight against discards.

[68] The vilification of McMillan-Scott by the Conservative Party included the alteration of Wikipedia pages, in an attempt "to airbrush the embarrassing past" of Michał Kamiński, chairman of the ECR.

[72] McMillan-Scott's rejection of David Cameron's new ECR group and his successful stand as an independent vice-president against Michał Kamiński finally led to his break with the Conservative Party.

On 12 March 2010 McMillan-Scott joined the Liberal Democrats, as he felt that they provided a more suitable home with a focus on human rights and an internationalist agenda.