Personal details

Lourens (Laurie) Ackermann was born in Pretoria in 1934. He lives with his wife, Denise, in Cape Town; they have three children and five grandchildren.

Education

Ackermann matriculated from Pretoria Boys' High School in 1950. After obtaining his BA cum laude from Stellenbosch University, he went to Oxford in 1954 as the Cape Rhodes Scholar. There he obtained a BA honours in jurisprudence. He returned to Stellenbosch to complete his LLB.

Professional history

Ackermann practised as an advocate at the Pretoria Bar from 1958 to 1980, becoming senior counsel in 1975. During this time he served on the Pretoria Bar Council and on the General Council of the Bar of South Africa.

After a number of acting appointments from 1976, he was permanently appointed to the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court in 1980. He served as such until 1987.

In September 1987 he resigned to inaugurate the newly established Harry Oppenheimer Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Stellenbosch, the first of its kind in South Africa. He held this position until the end of 1992. In 1989, as part of a group of constitutional lawyers, he participated in discussions about a future South African constitution with the exiled ANC.

While at Stellenbosch University he was a visiting scholar at the Columbia University Law School in New York and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg. He also served as a judge on the Lesotho Court of Appeal and on the post-independence Namibian Supreme Court.

In January 1993 he accepted reappointment to the South African Supreme Court, this time the Cape of Good Hope Provincial Division. In April 1994 he chaired the Cape Electoral Appeal Tribunal.

In August 1994 he was appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa. He retired from the Court in January 2004.

Other activities

During his time at the Supreme Court's Transvaal Provincial Division, he was the chairperson of the board of governors of Pretoria Boys' High School and was the national vice-president of the National Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Rehabilitation of Offenders.

Ackermann has spoken at South African and foreign universities on constitutional law and was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg in 2000. His particular field of interest is fundamental rights under the Constitution - in particular, the role of dignity in equality jurisprudence.

From 1988 to 2003 he was the South African secretary of the Rhodes Trust. He was also, until his retirement, a trustee of the Emmanuel Bradlow Foundation, an educational trust.

While on the Constitutional Court he chaired its library committee and was intimately involved with developing the vision of the library as a world-class resource "in and for Africa".

In his retirement he hopes to continue with the development of the library and the establishment of an institute for advanced constitutional, public, human rights and international law.

He has been awarded an LLD(h.c.) by the University of Stellenbosch and is an honorary fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

Service on the Constitutional Court

• Justice 1994 - 2004

Personal details
Richard Goldstone was born on 26 October 1938. He is married and has two daughters and four grandsons.

Education

He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BA LLB cum laude in 1962.

Professional History
After graduating, Goldstone practised as an advocate at the Johannesburg Bar.
In 1976 he was appointed senior counsel and in 1980 was made a judge of the Transvaal Supreme Court. In 1989 he was appointed to the Appellate Division.

From 1991 to 1994 he served as the chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which came to be known as the Goldstone Commission.

He served as a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from July 1994 to October 2003.

From 15 August 1994 to September 1996 he served as the chief prosecutor of the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

From August 1999 until December 2001 he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo. In December 2001 he was appointed the co-chairperson of the International Task Force on Terrorism, which was established by the International Bar Association.

In April 2004 the secretary-general of the United Nations appointed Goldstone to the independent committee to investigate the Iraqi oil-for-food programme (the Volcker Committee). In October 2007 he was appinted by the Registrars of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to chair an Advisory Committee on the Archiving of the Documents and Records of the two tribunals.

Other activities
From 1985 to 2000 Goldstone was the national president of the National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders. From 1994 to 2003 he was the chairperson of the board of the Human Rights Institute of South Africa; he remains a trustee.
He was the chairperson of the standing advisory committee on company law from 1984 to 2004.

Between 1996 and 2006 Goldstone was a member of the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar.

From 1997 to 2004 he served as the president of World ORT, an international training organisation. He was a member of the international panel established by the government of Argentina in August 1997 to monitor the inquiry into Nazi activities in the republic since 1938.

In 1998 Goldstone was the chairperson of a high-level group of international experts that met in Valencia, Spain, and drafted a Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities for the director-general of UNESCO (the Valencia Declaration).

From 1999 to 2003 he served as a member of the International Group of Advisers of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Since the beginning of 2004 he has been a visiting professor of law at a number of US law schools. He is presently the Distinguished Visitor from the Judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center and from August to December will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

He is a member of the boards of Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Center for Economic Social Rights.

From 1995 until March 2007 he served as the Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a governor of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

He chairs the advisory board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and is a member of the advisory board of the Brandeis University Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life. Goldstone is the chairperson of the Bradlow Foundation, a charitable educational trust.

He has received many awards, locally and internationally, including the International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association in 1994, the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the 2008 World Peace Through Law Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and honorary doctorates from:

• the University of Cape Town;
• the University of the Witwatersrand
• the University of Natal;
• the Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
• the University of Notre Dame;
• Maryland University College;
• Wilfred Laurier in Ontario;
• the University of Glasgow;
• the Catholic University of Brabant in Tilburg, the Netherlands;
• the University of Calgary;
• Emory University
• Princeton University
• the University of Wales;
• Duke University;
• Bard College;
• Brandeis University;
• Bowdoin College;
  Case Western Reserve University;
• Brooklyn Law School;
• University of the Pacific, Sacramento; and
• Fordham University

He is an honorary bencher of the Inner Temple, London, an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, an honorary member of the Association of the Bar of New York and a fellow of the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University. Goldstone is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Service on the Constitutional Court

• Justice 1994 - 2003

Personal details

The late Ismail Mahomed was born in Pretoria on 5 July 1931 and died on 17 June 2000. He was married.

Education

Judge Mahomed matriculated at Pretoria Indian Boys' High School in 1950. He completed a BA degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1953 and a BA honours with distinction in political science in 1954. He completed his LLB in 1957.

Professional history

Judge Mahomed was admitted to the Johannesburg Bar, because the Bar in Pretoria, where he lived, was reserved for whites.

During the early sixties he was admitted as an advocate in Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. In 1984 he was admitted to the English Bar.

He built an extensive litigation practice and in 1974 he became the first black person in the country's history to take silk.

Judge Mahomed's practice was concentrated on civil rights. He appeared in numerous trials on behalf of some of the leading figures in the anti-apartheid movement and played a leading role in challenges to the government's administrative and executive decrees during his 35-year career as an advocate.

In 1979 he was appointed a judge of the Appeal Court in Swaziland and in 1982 he was made a judge of appeal in Lesotho. He later became the Chief Justice of Namibia and the president of the Lesotho Court of Appeal. In this capacity he gave some of these courts' leading constitutional and administrative law judgments.

He also co-chaired the Conference for a Democratic South Africa, better known as Codesa.

In 1991, after the unbanning of the ANC, he became the first black person in South African history to be made a permanent judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa.

Judge Mahomed was appointed to the Constitutional Court in 1994. In 1998 he was made Chief Justice, a position he held until his death in 2000.

Other activities

Judge Mahomed published numerous articles in law journals and lectured on human rights jurisprudence at universities abroad.

He was made an honorary professor of law at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990. He received honorary doctorates in law from the University of Delhi and the University of Pennsylvania.

He was awarded the Indicator Human Rights award in 1990 and also received the special award of the Black Lawyers' Association for his outstanding contribution to the development of human rights in South Africa.

Service on the Constitutional Court

• Justice 1994 - 1998 Appointed by President Nelson Mandela
• Elevated By President Nelson Mandela to Chief Justice 1998 - 2000
• Died 17 June 2000