Expert Team: Initiative on Apex Court Appointments
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 practised 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 University of Cape Town where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence.
Since her fifteen-year term as a judge 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, rule of law, human rights and equality.
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Asanga Welikala is Head of Public Law at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh; and the Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law. He is also a Research Associate of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and Research Fellow of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), Sri Lanka.
Asanga’s research and teaching interests lie in British public law, comparative and Commonwealth constitutional law, applied constitutional theory, and the history of constitutional ideas. He is a leading expert on Sri Lankan constitutional law, and has been engaged in constitutional and legal advisory work in Sri Lanka, Iraq, the Maldives, Nepal, Thailand, Somalia, Egypt, Libya, Myanmar, and The Gambia.
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Sujit Choudhry practices constitutional law, in Canada and globally. He is an internationally recognized authority on comparative constitutional law. He has been an advisor to constitution building, governance, and rule of law processes for over 20 years, including in Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Libya, Myanmar, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Ukraine, Yemen and Zimbabwe. He has lectured or spoken in three dozen countries. Choudhry has published over 100 articles, book chapters, policy manuals, reports and working papers. His edited volumes include The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016), Constitution Making (Edward Elgar, 2016), Constitutional Design for Divided Societies (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Migration of Constitutional Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Territory and Power in Constitutional Transitions (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Security Sector Reform and Constitutional Transitions (Oxford University Press, 2019). Choudhry founded and directs the Center for Constitutional Transitions (CT), which generates and mobilizes knowledge in support of constitution building by assembling and leading international networks of experts to produce evidence-based policy options for decision-makers and agenda-setting research, in partnership with a global network of multilateral organizations, think tanks, and NGOs. CT has worked with over 50 experts from over 25 countries.
Choudhry is also a practicing barrister, and has a broad public law practice on questions of constitutional law, administrative law, public international law and international human rights law, in the Canadian courts, including in judicial reviews, appeals, and arbitrations. He frequently appears as counsel, including in the Supreme Court of Canada in Charkaoui (security certificates), and in Khadr 1 and Khadr 2 (Guantanamo detainees). He is currently counsel in a number of high profile constitutional challenges brought under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including Bakan et al. v. Canada and Cool World et al. v. Twitter, landmark cases globally on the governance of social media platforms. Choudhry was a member of the Governing Toronto Advisory Panel, which proposed major reforms to the structure of municipal government in Toronto, and sat on the Board of Directors of Legal Aid Ontario, one of the largest publicly funded legal assistance programs in the world.
Choudhry was named Practitioner of the Year by the South Asian Bar Association of Toronto in 2011. In 2015, the South Asian Bar Associations of Southern California and Northern California each awarded Choudhry the Trailblazer Award. In 2010, Choudhry received the Trudeau Fellowship. Choudhry holds law degrees from the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), the University of Toronto, and Harvard Law School, and served as Law Clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada. For 20 years, Choudhry was a full-time academic at the University of Toronto, New York University, and UC Berkeley (where he served as Dean).
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Mark Freeman is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), a non-governmental organisation that recently celebrated its tenth anniversary as a global peacebuilding innovator.
A leading expert in political transitions and high-level peace negotiations with more than 30 years of experience, Mr Freeman is regularly consulted for advice on crisis management and conflict resolution. He has worked in countries including Ukraine, Venezuela, Colombia, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bosnia, Burundi, DRC, The Gambia, El Salvador, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Nepal, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.
Prior to founding IFIT, Mr. Freeman was Chief of External Relations and a member of the Senior Management Team at the International Crisis Group, a leading global conflict prevention organisation. He also helped launch the International Center for Transitional Justice and served as its first Director of International Affairs. Earlier in his career he worked at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in New York and as a corporate lawyer in Toronto.
A widely recognised thought leader in international law and human rights, Mr. Freeman is the co-author of Negotiating Transitional Justice (Cambridge, 2020), which draws upon his years as an adviser inside the Colombian peace talks in Havana. He is also the author of Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice (Cambridge, 2010) and Truth Commissions and Procedural Fairness (Cambridge, 2006), and the co-author of International Human Rights Law: Essentials of Canadian Law (Irwin Law, 2004).
Mr. Freeman holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University, a Juris Doctor from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, and a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School where he was a Human Rights Fellow and James Kent Scholar. He has been a Lecturer-in-Law at KU Leuven and the University of Ottawa, and a Visiting Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law.
Mr. Freeman is a member of the International Panel of Experts of the International Commission on Missing Persons and an Advisor to the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum. A Canadian and Belgian citizen, Mr. Freeman speaks English, French, Spanish, Italian and Catalan.
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