A FOUNDING director at Essex University’s Human Rights Centre who campaigned for peace in Northern Ireland has died.

Professor Kevin Boyle helped set up a campaign in the 1960s which pressed for an end to anti-Catholic discrimination in the region.

He later become a founding member of the Colchester-based centre in 1990, serving as a director until 2001 and then from 2006 to 2007.

In 2002, he spent a year in Geneva with the United Nations as Senior Adviser to Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

He is believed to have died on Boxing Day, after a long battle with illness.