Judge Johann Kriegler

Johann Kriegler, a one-time human-rights lawyer in apartheid South Africa, headed his country’s transitional elections in 1994 and later served on its first Constitutional Court. Since retiring from that court he has, at the behest of the United Nations, the African Union and a number of governments and national and international NGOs, been engaged as an expert in many parts of the world, more specifically in electoral administration and dispute resolution as well as in training electoral administrators, judges, prosecutors and trial lawyers.

His involvement in these and other human-rights, good-governance and rule-of-law initiatives has extended from Timor-Leste through Maldives, Afghanistan, the Middle East and much of Africa to the Caribbean and Ibero-America. He has chaired international enquiries into judicial independence in Uganda and Malawi, audits of violence-torn presidential elections in Kenya and of Bangladesh’s criminal-justice system, an international tribunal into the Iranian massacre of political prisoners and the selection of electoral commissions for Iraq and Sierra Leone. In addition Judge Kriegler currently lectures in one or other of his fields of expertise, most recently in Libya, Sudan, Pakistan and Egypt.

At home in South Africa he conducts arbitrations and serves as a trustee of several human-rights NGOs: Freedom Under Law, of which he is founder chair, actively engages in strategic litigation defending the rule of law against executive abuse. He is an extraordinary professor of law at his alma mater, an honorary life member of the Johannesburg Bar and an honorary bencher of Gray’s Inn.