Shawcross was appointed a member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees's Informal Advisory Group in 1995, a post he held until 2000. From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the BBC World Service Advisory Council. In 2008, he became a Patron of the Wiener Library, and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Association and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society. Shawcross was appointed to the chairmanship of the Charity Commission for England and Wales on 1 October 2012, serving 2 three-year terms as its chairman until February 2018. His appointment was controversially extended in 2015; a decision that was criticised as "rushed" for "political reasons" by his opponents. A January 2018 assessment of his tenure concluded that he "won praise from government but heavy criticism from within the charity sector." In March 2019, he was named by the UK Foreign Secretary as Special Representative on UK victims of Qadhafi-sponsored IRA terrorism. In March 2020, he delivered his report to the Foreign Secretary but, controversially, it was not made public. In January 2021, the British government appointed Shawcross to head the review of its anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent. Amnesty International and 16 other human rights and community organisations announced they would boycott the review in protest at the appointment of William Shawcross as its chairman as they feared a “whitewash” because of his perceived anti-Muslim political positions. Shawcross was appointed the Commissioner for Public Appointments in September 2021. As commissioner, on 24 January 2023 he opened an investigation into the appointment of Richard Sharp to the chairmanship of the BBC amid allegations that the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, had recommended Sharp's appointment after Sharp had helped secure a loan guarantee agreement for Johnson. Six days after beginning the investigation into Sharp's appointment, Shawcross wrote to Julian Knight, the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, to recuse himself from its deliberations, disclosing that he had met Sharp "on previous occassions" which could give the impression of a prior conflict of interest. Shawcross announced that he would be handing his investigation to an "independent person" to complete while retaining the other regulatory powers of his office. Political views Shawcross's politics have been described as having moved to the right over the course of his life. His 1979 book on Cambodia, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, resulted in Shawcross's