John Dugard

John Dugard SC is a South African international lawyer. During the apartheid era he directed an advocacy and litigation body (the Centre for Applied legal Studies) committed to the promotion of human rights attached to the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1978 he published the definitive work on the law of apartheid: Human Rights and the South African Legal Order. Following South Africa's transformation to democracy he assisted in the drafting of the Bill of Rights in the 1996 Constitution. From 1995 to 1997 he served as Director of the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law. In 1998 he retired from the University of the Witwatersrand and took up the Chair of International law at the University of Leiden.

John Dugard is a member of the Institut de Droit International. From 1997 to 2011 he was a member of the International Law Commission, in which capacity he served as Special Rapporteur on the subject of diplomatic protection. For seven years he was Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He has been a judge  ad hoc in the International Court of Justice in several cases. He is the author of Recognition and the United Nations (1987) and International Law: A South Africa Perspective (now in its fourth edition).