Pretoria - After 15 years as chairperson of Freedom Under Law, iconic jurist Justice Johann Kriegler this week announced that he wishes to step down as a director and chairperson.
The board expressed its appreciation for the dedication and unflagging leadership displayed by Justice Kriegler since the founding of Freedom Under Law in 2008.
For the lengthy period he has led the board he has been at the forefront of work done to confront lapses in the rule of law across the southern African region.
The board said it believes that without his personal bravery and clear moral leadership many abuses of power would have passed without being exposed or challenged. His tenacity has ensured that many of those challenges have been successful.
Justice Kriegler served on the first Constitutional Court of South Africa and retired last year at the age of 70. His career included 25 years at the Johannesburg Bar (he was elected its leader), then 10 years as a high court and Appellate Division judge, followed by his eight years on South Africa’s top court.
He gave up the first two years of his retirement to a two-year acting judicial appointment, where he mainly engaged in judicial education (for aspirant judges, induction orientation for new appointees and continuing education for lower and superior court judges) and the training of public prosecutors.
Justice Kriegler co-drafted the South African judicial code of conduct. He has been involved in training judges from a number of countries – ranging from Hong Kong and Iraq to Sudan, Namibia and Swaziland – with an emphasis on constitutional, human rights and electoral dispute adjudication.
For almost 40 years Justice Kriegler, the honorary patron of advocacy training in South Africa, has been actively involved in training practising advocates across the common-law world. He also headed the Independent Electoral Commission through South Africa’s liberation elections in 1994 and was instrumental in establishing its first permanent elections agency, which he chaired for a number of years.
Subsequently he has engaged in electoral missions, often in war-torn places, under the auspices of the UN, the AU and other international agencies. These range from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Angola, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iraq.
In 2008 he headed a six-month AU-sanctioned international audit of Kenya’s violence-torn 2007 presidential elections and in 2010/11 spent nine months in Afghanistan adjudicating electoral disputes arising from hotly contested legislative elections.
Over the years Justice Kriegler has participated in a wide range of international missions relating to legal and related matters of public concern on behalf of agencies such as the International Commission of Jurists, the International Bar Association and the UN Development Programme.
He was also the founding chairperson of Lawyers for Human Rights (1981). Between international missions he has served an array of human-rights causes.
These have included a number of non-governmental organisations, notably the Aids Law Project (now named Section27), which forced the South African government to abandon its Aids denialist policy.
Justice Kriegler has also trained dozens of electoral administrators and adjudicators in running successful elections and introduced numerous judges to principled thinking founded on the rule of law and respect for the individual.
He is the author of a standard textbook on criminal procedure and has lectured in recent years on judicial and electoral matters on five continents.
In recognition of his many and lasting contributions to law and justice, the General Council of the Bar this year bestowed on him the Sydney and Felicia Kentridge Award. This is an annual award in recognition of the person or institution “adjudged to have made an outstanding contribution, worthy of public recognition, to law in southern Africa”.
In paying tribute to him, Freedom Under Law said it was proud to have been led by such a brave and honourable combatant for the rule of law.
The board has elected as its new chairperson Justice Azhar Cachalia, a director since 2021.
Justice Kriegler meanwhile said Freedom Under Law can, with due modesty, claim success in a long list of notable interventions where the rule of law has been at stake.
Pretoria News