John Dugard has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Law for Palestine since 2020. He is a South African lawyer, specialized in international law and human rights law. 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 defence of human rights. After the fall of apartheid, he participated in the drafting of 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 and has received several honorary doctorates from South Africa universities for his work in the fields of human rights and international law. He is a senior counsel of the High Court of South Africa.
John Dugard is professor emeritus of the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Leiden. He has held visiting professorships in universities in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. From 1995 to 1997 He was Director of the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely in the fields of international law and human rights and has authored eight books on these subjects. He is an honorary member of the American Society of International Law and a member of the Institut de Droit International.
Professor Dugard has held a number of 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 has 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 of 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.