John Dugard

Christopher John Robert Dugard (born  August 23, 1936 in Fort Beaufort , Cape Province ) is a South African lawyer . From 1969 to 1998 he was a professor at the Witwatersrand University and from 1998 to 2006 at the University of Leiden . In addition, he worked from 1997 to 2011 as a member of the International Law Commission and as a special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission and the UN Human Rights Council and was nominated as ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in five cases . His work focuses on human rights , international criminal law and the history of apartheid in his home country.

Life

John Dugard was born in Fort Beaufort in 1936 . He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1980 after completing his academic training at Stellenbosch University . From 1965 to 1969 he taught as a lecturer and then until 1998 as a professor at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg , where he was dean of the law faculty from 1975 to 1977 and headed the Center for Applied Law Studies from 1978 to 1990 , the aim of which was “the Spreading Human Rights in South Africa ”is. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton University , Duke University , the University of California, Berkeley , the University of Pennsylvania and the University of New South Wales . After the end of apartheid in South Africa, he was involved in the drafting of a transitional constitution and the new constitution of 1996 from 1993 to 1995. He was also President of the National Association of South Africa, the International Law Association, from 1993 to 1995 and 1998 .

From 1995 to 1997 he was Director of the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at the University of Cambridge and then from 1998 to 2006 as Professor of International Law at the University of Leiden . He was also a member of the United Nations International Law Commission from 1997 to 2011 . At the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague , he was nominated as ad hoc judge in five cases; once from Malaysia and twice each from Rwanda and Costa Rica . After nomination by the national groups of Australia , the Netherlands , South Africa and Sweden at the Permanent Court of Arbitration , he also ran for the rotating judges' elections at the ICJ in October 2002, but did not achieve the required number of votes in the General Assembly of the United Nations .

With the beginning of the conflict known as the Second Intifada between the Arab Palestinians and the Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip and West Bank , John Dugard was appointed chairman of a committee of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2000 to investigate the human rights situation in the affected areas. From 2001 to 2008 he was special rapporteur of the commission and later of its successor institution, the UN Human Rights Council . In a special session of the council in July 2006, he described the situation in the Palestinian Territories as "unbearable". A year later, in a report criticized from various quarters, he rated Israel's policies in these areas as "similar to apartheid" and related Israeli laws and practices as violating the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination .

Awards

John Dugard was awarded honorary doctorates by the Universities of Natal (1990), Cape Town (1996), Port Elizabeth (2003), Pretoria (2004) and the Witwatersrand University (2004) . Since 1995 he has been the first and so far only lawyer from South Africa to be appointed a member of the Institut de Droit international , and since 2008 he has been an honorary member of the American Society for International Law . Since his retirement in 2006, an annual “John Dugard Lecture Series” has been held in his honor at the University of Leiden , to which internationally renowned legal scholars are invited. In 2010 he was awarded the Gruber Justice Prize . In 2012 he received the Order of the Baobab in Gold.

Works (selection)

• Human Rights and the South African Legal Order. Princeton 1978
• Recognition and the United Nations. Cambridge 1987
• The Last Years of Apartheid: Civil Liberties in South Africa. New York 1992 (as co-author)
• International Criminal Law and Procedure. Aldershot 1996 (as co-author)
• International Law: A South African Perspective. Third edition. Cape Town 2006

literature

• Curriculum Vitae and Publications of John Dugard. In: Leiden Journal of International Law. 20/2007. Cambridge University Press, pp. 983-1000, ISSN  0922-1565

Web links

• Universiteit Leiden - Faculty of Law: Prof. dr. J. Dugard (English, with picture)