Elisabeth Velina Jones is a Welsh lawyer who served as the Counsel General-designate for Wales from 7 August 2024 to 11 September 2024 and has also served as legal adviser to the

Senedd The Senedd ( ; ), officially known as the Welsh Parliament in English and () in Welsh, is the devolved, unicameral legislature of Wales. A democratically elected body, Its role is to scrutinise the Welsh Government and legislate on devolve ...

Early life and education

Jones was born in

Mountain Ash Mountain ash may refer to: * ''Eucalyptus regnans'', the tallest of all flowering plants, native to Australia * Mountain-ashes or rowans, varieties of trees and shrubs in the genus ''Sorbus'' See also

* Mountain Ash, Rhondda Cynon Taf, a town ...

. She attended Mountain Ash Comprehensive School. Jones studied French and German at

Somerville College Somerville College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. It began admitting men in 1994. The college's liberal tone derives from its f ...

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

, and studied for an

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

Career

Jones initially worked in commercial and employment law in the City of London at the firm Theodore Goddard and at Bristol at the firm Osborne Clarke and Lyons Davidson. She also worked giving free legal advice at the Gloucester Law Centre. She later worked at the

European Court of Human Rights The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The court hears applications alleging that a co ...

. In 2012, she was appointed Chief Legal Advisor to the

National Assembly for Wales The Senedd ( ; ), officially known as the Welsh Parliament in English and () in Welsh, is the devolved, unicameral legislature of Wales. A democratically elected body, Its role is to scrutinise the Welsh Government and legislate on devolve ...

. She served in this role until 2019. In 2024, she was appointed as Counsel General-designate in the

Eluned Morgan government The Eluned Morgan government is the government of Wales formed by Eluned Morgan from August 2024, following her appointment as First Minister of Wales on 6 August. Morgan first formed an interim government largely continuing the previous Gethin ...

on "an interim basis". She replaced

Vaughan Gething Humphrey Vaughan ap David Gething (born 15 March 1974) is a Welsh Labour Co-op politician who served as First Minister of Wales from March to August 2024, and served as leader of Welsh Labour from March to July 2024, making him the first blac ...

, who had appointed himself to the role after

Mick Antoniw Mick Antoniw (; born 1 September 1954) is a Welsh Labour and Co-operative politician, who was Counsel General for Wales from 2021 to 2024, having previously served in the position from 2016 to 2017. He previously served as Minister for the C ...

resigned from the cabinet. She had specific statutory functions in that role, including in relation to Senedd Cymru Bills. However, as she was not an elected Minister, any ministerial powers associated with the role had to be executed by a sitting minister. The Law Society responded to her appointment by calling for a return to a political appointee in the role, saying that the lack of an elected Senedd member in the role presents a risk of loss of political focus around justice in Wales. She is now currently a member of the Legal Wales Executive Committee.

Personal life

Jones has one daughter named Seren.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jones, Elisabeth Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century Welsh politicians 21st-century Welsh lawyers 20th-century Welsh lawyers 20th-century Welsh women lawyers Alumni of the University of Bristol Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford