Eric Reginald Lubbock, 4th Baron Avebury (29 September 1928 – 14 February 2016), was an English politician and human rights campaigner.

It was hampered by organisational difficulties, and progress was slow, with a loss of votes and seats during the period of Harold Wilson's Labour government.

"When I beat McWhirter for the second time in 1966", Lubbock said in 2015,[5] "he said at the count that he now realised that the people in Orpington were only interested in their back gardens.

[7] In the Commons, Lubbock was on the Speaker's Commission on Electoral Law (1964–1966), and proposed STV in multi-member constituencies, only to be voted down by 18–1.

As Baron Avebury, he sat on the Royal Commission on Standards of Conduct in Public Life (1974–1976), and was Liberal Spokesman on Immigration and Race Relations (1971–1983).

[8] In 1987, as a jocular protest against the cost of cremation, he offered to leave his body to Battersea dogs home "to vary the inmates' diet."

Bill Wadman-Taylor, manager of the home, said: "I am sure there is a lot of nutritional value in the noble Lord and the dogs are not fussy, but we just couldn't do it.

[9] He was a member of the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs Team, speaking on conflict resolution and human rights.

[14] Avebury visited Eastern Turkey, Syria and Iraq during the 1990s on fact-finding missions to investigate human rights abuses against the Kurdish minority groups in those countries.

Subsequent reports published by the Parliamentary Human Rights Group resulted in a ten-year ban from entering Turkey.

"[24] As a backbench Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords during the 2010–2015 parliament, he repeatedly voted against his own party on issues like the Bedroom Tax, which he opposed,[25] and cuts to Legal Aid.

[15] The Dictionary of Liberal Biography called Avebury "a scourge of tyrants in Central and South America, Asia and Africa", noting that he had been detained twice while pursuing human rights causes in Sri Lanka and Guyana.

Together with his mother in 1957, he set up the Maurice Lubbock Memorial Fund to commemorate his father, following his early death.

This established a Trust, which he chaired for 56 years, aimed at supporting Engineering and Management at Balliol College, Oxford.

During his presidency, he proposed a form of words to introduce the concept of 'sustainable development' into Article 2 of the Treaty of Rome in a letter to The Times of 20 January 1975.