John Dugard SC

John Dugard has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Law for Palestine since 2020. During the apartheid era in South Africa, he directed the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, a unit committed to litigation and advocacy in defense of human rights. After the fall of apartheid, he participated in drafting the Bill of Rights for the new South African Constitution.

In 2013, He was awarded the Order of the Baobab, South Africa’s highest award for community service. He has received several honorary doctorates from South African universities for his human rights and international law work. He is a senior counsel of the High Court of South Africa.

Professor Dugard has held several positions in the field of International Law. For fifteen years he was a member of the UN International Law Commission and served for many years as judge ad hoc on the International Court of Justice.

From 2001 to 2008 he was UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and chaired two commissions of inquiry into Israel’s violations of international law: the first, for the United Nations in 2001 into violations of human rights and humanitarian law committed in the course of The Second Intifada; and the second, for the League of Arab States into crimes committed in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, 2008-2009. He has written widely on Palestinian issues and from 2010 to 2014 he was juror of the Russell Tribunal that examined Israel’s violations of international law in occupied Palestine.