Christof Heyns Memorial event

This Christof Heyns Memorial event is presented annually in memory of the manifold contributions of the late Professor Christof Heyns to human rights, as lawyer, advocate, activist and educator, but also down-to-earth family man, friend and colleague. Christof Heyns was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2010 to 2016; and was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2017 to 2020. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Law,  University of Pretoria, and as Director of its Centre for Human Rights. Christof passed away on 28 March 2021. In 2025, the Heyns family will be present at the University of Oxford, where Christof was a long-serving tutor on the Master’s programme in International Human Rights Law and served as an inaugural member of the Advisory Council of the Bonavero Institute from its establishment to his untimely death.

Kate O'Regan is the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws.  In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009,  she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.