Child abuse inquiry: who is new chair Lowell Goddard?

"I love the fact that in the type of law I practise and have always practised, I engage with a large number and a huge variety of people from all walks of life. It is a very broadening experience."

So said Justice Lowell Goddard, the new Chair of Theresa May's child sex abuse inquiry, in an interview with the “Professionelle” website in 2008. Her new role, to which she beat a shortlist of 149 other candidates, will require plenty of diplomacy.

May has today announced the creation of a new inquiry, with full statuatory powers, into historic cases of child sex abuse in the UK. The inquiry replaces an ailing investigation into the same issues, which was set up last year to consider whether public bodies were guilty of neglect or of perpetuating a cover-up, following claims paedophiles had operated in Westminster in the 1980s. May has said she hopes the new inquiry will set itself a deadline for completion to avoid unnecessary delays, but it is likely to take more than a year.

This move follows widespread criticism of the previous inquiry, from which two chairs have had to stand down. Dame Fiona Woolf and Baroness Butler-Sloss, Goddard's two predecessors, were both considered to have too many “establishment” connections to properly investigate abuse cases which allegedly involved figures from that same establishment. Any chair of the inquiry will need to mediate between the demands of campaigners and victims groups and withstand pressure from politicians. May said today that incidents of abuse exposed so far were only the "tip of the iceberg." The new inquiry will have to be forensic in its approach.

Goddard's key distinction is that she has formerly worked overseas, which, May will hope, gives her the distance from the British elite that sex abuse survivors and other observers have said the inquiry needs. When she stood down from the inquiry last year, Fiona Woolf said it would be difficult to find a replacement who was sufficiently removed from powerful political and civil figures, saying “it is going to be really hard to find someone with no connections. A hermit?”

But Goddard also has other qualities to recommend her. A determined and highly successful legal operator, she is believed to be the first Maori woman to serve as a high court judge in New Zealand. She has experience in dealing with high-profile allegations against public bodies, having served from 2007 until 2012 as the chair of New Zealand's Independent Police Conduct Authority. Her period in the job included oversight of an inquiry into police handling of child abuse cases. She has also served on the UN subcommittee on the prevention of torture.

She has been a high court judge since 1995 and has presided over several high-profile murder cases, in 2002 imposing a record 28-year sentence on a man convicted of murdering his two stepdaughters.

"You will only really excel if you have passion, but passion has to be tempered by rationality and objectivity and refined by one's life's learning. It needs to be honed," she told Professionelle. May will hope she brings both qualities to bear on her new role.