Participant list (Workshop on Constitution Building, Cape Town, South Africa)
Zaid Al-Ali
Al-Ali Zaid is a Legal Advisor to UNDP’s Regional Programme on Governance. Zaid Al-Ali studied law at King’s College London, the University of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and Harward Law School. He has been practicing international commercial arbitration in Paris, New York, and London since 1999 and has been Legal Advisor to the United Nations in Iraq on constitutional and parliamentary reform issues and on strengthening the rule of law since 2005. His book on the Iraqi Constitution will be published by Hart Publishing (Oxford) in 2009.
Radheshyam Adhikari
Radheshyam Adhikari is a member of the Constituent Assembly of Nepal.
Ekuru Aukot
Ekuru Aukot is currently the Director of the Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review in Kenya. He recently joined the Editorial Board of, and developed the current ‘African Section’ of The Refugee Law Reader. He teaches Law on Refugees & IDPs at postgraduate level at the School of Law, University of Nairobi. He is a regular lecturer on the Law, Policy & Practice on Refugees and IDPs Protection in Kenya at the East Africa School on Refugees & Humanitarian Affairs (EASRHA). He is a co-convener on the theme of Group Rights in the on-going National Action Plan & Policy for Human Rights in Kenya.
Dr Aukot completed his PhD in International Refugee Law from the University of Warwick, UK; an LLM in Law in Development. As an advocate of the High Court of Kenya, he litigates on access to justice by the poor/marginalized/the vulnerable groups/communities who cannot afford legal representation/court fees under the auspices of Kituo Cha Sheria (the Centre for Legal Empowerment), a national NGO with offices in Nairobi & Mombasa where he is the immediate former Executive Director. He is the supervisor of the Urban Refugee Intervention Project under Kituo that provides specialized legal aid to refugees. Dr Aukot has published in peer reviewed journals on refugee law, rights & protection, governance and human rights, constitutional law, on internally displaced persons (IDPs) and is interested on gender issues. He also teaches Constitutional Law, Legal systems of Kenya on part-time basis at the Kenya School of Law. He is an astute enthusiast of positive political, social and economic change for the Kenyan nation. He hails from Turkana district, one of the former Northern Frontier Districts under British Colonial rule, a region he critically analyses and refers to in his recent research, as ‘The Kenya of the North: A Legal-political Scar in the Creation of the Kenya post-colony’.
Hassen Ebrahim
Hassen Ebrahim spent 12 years in exile as a member of the African National Congress. In addition to his political assignments, he obtained a degree in law at the University of Edinburgh and Botswana. He returned from exile in 1991 to assist the ANC in establishing its legal structures within the country. Later in 1991, he joined the ANC's National negotiations team as its National Coordinator to facilitate the constitutional negotiations at Codesa and the Multi-Party Negotiations.After the interim constitution was adopted, Hassen was elected to the Gauteng Legislature in the first democratic elections in 1994 but asked to resign and assume the post of CEO of the Constitutional Assembly. After successfully managing the process of negotiation of the country's first democratic constitution, Hassen joined the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development as a Deputy-Director General. In the Department of Justice, Hassen assumed several different assignments including responsibility as the fist CIO, establishment of the Department Corporate Services component, and finally appointment as the country's first Chief Master.
After a short spell in the private sector where he became a member of the executive team of T-Systems, he was lured back into the public sector in January 2009 to assume responsibility as one of the special advisors to the National Minister of Health.
Rohan Edrisinha
Rohan Edrisinha teaches at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka - specializing in Constitutional Law. He is also a founder, Director and Head of the Legal Division, Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent public policy institute engaged in research and advocacy on conflict resolution, constitutional and law reform, human rights and governance related issues. He is a holder of LL.B University of Colombo; LL.M, University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the Faculty of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa in 1995. At present, he is a Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School - research on Religion, Ethnicity and Nationalism and the Sri Lankan Peace Process. During the recent years, he was undertaking research and advocacy-exploring options for a political solution to Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict. He was an unofficial advisor to the Chief Government negotiator, the Minister of Constitutional Affairs, during the peace talks between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE in 2003/04 and attended the last 3 rounds of talks during that period.Nicholas “Fink” Haysom
Torquato Jardim
Torquato Jardim is an attorney and former Justice of the Superior Electoral Court (1988-92) of Brazil. He received his education from the University of Michigan Law School, Georgetown Law Center and the University of Paris–Strasbourg. Mr Jardim is presently serving as a professor of Constitutional Law and the president of the Brazilian Institute of Elections Law (IBRADE). He is the author of several articles on election law and the book Direito Eleitoral Positivo (1998).
Mohammad Jawari
Sakuntala Kadirgamar-Rajasingham
Sakuntala Kadirgamar-Rajasingham is presently working as Senior Advisor in Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal of UNDP. Prior to this, she was Project Manager, Constitution Building Program for UNDP Somalia; Senior Advisor to the Constitution Building Project, International IDEA and also the Head of the South Asia Program for International IDEA. She served as Programme Officer at Law and Development Studies Division, Marga Institute for Research and Development in Sri Lanka. She has worked as a consultant for Law and Society Trust, Sri Lanka for the development of human rights training manuals. She has also worked for The World Bank on the legal status of women and labor standards in several African countries. She is a former Board Member of a Washington based International NGO promoting women’s legal rights called Women, Law and Development. She is a regular contributor to publications on legal literacy for women, domestic violence, and democratization.
She holds degrees in Law (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka), in Social Sciences (University of Reading, UK) and a Ph.D. in Law (University of Sydney, Australia).
Ibrahima Kane
Ibrahima Kane heads the Africa Union Advocacy Program. Kane is qualified as a lawyer in Senegal and France. Prior to joining OSIEA in 2007, he was a senior lawyer in charge of the Africa program at INTERIGHTS for 10 years. A founding member of RADDHO, a Senegalese human rights organization, Kane directed a human rights program that focused on public education and women’s human rights in five West African countries— Cape Verde, Republic of Guinea, Republic of Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, and Senegal— for six years.
He has particular interest in economic, social and cultural rights; women’s rights; and the pursuit of justice through regional and international mechanisms. Kane has collaborated very closely with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Union Commission for the last eight years. He is an author of a number reports on the Africa Union, the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, and the protection of human rights by Regional Economic Communities bodies. He has also been an associate lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Essex since 2005.
Christina Murray
Christina Murray is Professor of Human Rights and Constitutional Law at the University of Cape Town. Between 1994 and 1996 she served on a panel of seven experts advising the South African Constitutional Assembly. Since then her work has focused on constitution making, constitutional design and the implementation of constitutions.
Work elsewhere includes Kenya, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Southern Sudan and Bolivia.
Amongst her most recent published work is a book, edited with Michelle O’Sullivan: Advancing Women’s Rights: the first decade of democracy (2005) and papers on traditional leadership, ethnicity in South Africa’s constitutional design, and government and opposition. She is currently serving on the Kenyan Committee of Experts which has been established to facilitate the completion of the review of the Constitution of Kenya.
Varsha Redkar-Palepu
Varsha Redkar-Palepu is a South Asian, Canadian. Her academic qualifications are in International Development and a Post-Graduate in Education. She has an International Masters of Public Administration from the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University. She has worked from the United Nations for the past 7 years, with UNDP learning and capacity development at head quarters for four years, followed by two years with the Resident Coordinator and UN Reform support team to country offices with UNSSC in Italy. Varsha joined UNDP Somalia through a leadership programme and now serves as the acting Project Manager of the Somalia Constitution-Making Support Project under the political leadership of the UN Political Office for Somalia and the SRSG.
Varsha has worked in towards gender equality programmes in UNDP, and with CIDA in Sri Lanka and in Romania for small to medium enterprises. She has worked in Canada with International Development and local community development NGOs.
Anthony Regan
Anthony Regan is constitutional lawyer and a Fellow in the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Program at the ANU. His main field of research is the law and politics of constitutions, conflict and reconciliation, and the design of the state as part of post-conflict political settlements. He has been a constitutional adviser to the governments of Papua New Guinea and Uganda, living and working in in Papua New Guinea (1981-91 and 1994-97) and Uganda (1991-94). In Uganda he was a full-time advisor in the constitution making process. He has worked in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) at various points since 1981, and has been adviser to the Bougainville parties in the Bougainville peace process, 1997 to present. He worked full-time as an adviser on constitutional development in Bougainville from August 2002 to October 2004. He has undertaken work in relation to the Solomon Islands and Sri Lankan peace processes and constitution-making processes in Uganda (1991-1996), East Timor (2001-2002) and Solomon Islands, and advises the leadership of Nagaland (northeast
India) in negotiations with the Government of India. He has written extensively on decentralization and autonomy in PNG, peace-building and constitution-making in various contexts, and related subjects.
Cheryl Saunders
Cheryl Saunders is a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne and the founding director of its Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. She has specialist research interests in constitutional and administrative law and comparative public law, with particular reference to federalism, intergovernmental relations, constitution-making and comparative constitutional method and design. She has held visiting positions at the universities of Cambridge, Paris II, Indiana (Bloomington), Hong Kong, Copenhagen,
Fribourg, Capetown, Auckland and Oxford and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Cordoba, Argentina. She is President of the International Association of Centres for Federal Studies, President Emeritus of the International Association of Constitutional Law, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. She is a member of the Advisory Board of International IDEA and of the Program Committee of the Forum of Federations.
Amos Sawyer
Amos Sawyer was the President of the Interim Government of National Unity in Liberia (November 22, 1990–March 7, 1994). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. He lately served as Associate Director and Research Scholar, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, U.S. and is currently Chairman of the Governance Reform Commission in Liberia, which has recently become the Governance Commission. His book, Beyond Plunder: Toward Democratic Governance in Liberia, was published in the spring of 2005.
Renata Segura
Renata Segura is the Program Officer for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, a program of the Social Science Research Council, where she leads the work in Latin America and the Caribbean. CPPF strengthens the knowledge base and analytical capacity of the United Nations system in the fields of conflict prevention and management, peacemaking and peacebuilding by providing UN staff with a systematic channel to outside experts in order to deepen the national, regional, or thematic analysis on which the United Nations bases its work on conflict.
Renata received her Ph.D. from the political science department, New School for Social Research; her dissertation focuses on constitution-making as a mechanism for inclusion and conflict resolution in Colombia and Ecuador. The dissertation does a comparative analysis of these two cases to examine how effective constitution making is as a mechanism to promote the institutionalization of inclusion. At the New School, she was a Louis Fischer Fellow, an Inter-American Foundation Fellow, and a Colfuturo grant recipient. She holds an M.A. in comparative politics from the New School for Social Research and a B.A. in political science from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Renata has been an instructor at Parsons School of Design, and served as Program Officer for the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research for several years. Prior to coming to the United States, she worked for the NGO and research center CINEP in Bogotá, where she was a researcher on several projects related to civil society, conflict and political crisis. In addition to her academic background, Renata worked for several years as a reporter for a nationally televised news program and a widely-read news magazine. She is currently working on a book manuscript comparing constitution-making processes in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.
Fredrick Ssempebwa
Fredrick Ssempebwa received his LL.B with honours from the University of East Africa at Dar-es-salaam in 1969 where he was a John F. Kennedy Scholar. He then proceeded to Queen's University Belfast, Ireland where he received his LL.M in 1971. He is a celebrated Professor of Law at Makerere University in Uganda and the Universities of Dar-es-Salaam and Zambia. He has authored many learned articles and is widely published in many of the world's leading law journals.
Fredrick Ssempebwa has several times been the President of the Uganda Law Society, and he has also been a Minister in the Government of Uganda. He sits on the Boards of several major corporate bodies and Government Parastatals in Uganda. He is currently the Chairman of the Constitutional Review Commission which has been charged with reviewing the 1995 Constitution of the Republic of Uganda. Professor Ssempebwa has practiced law both within and outside the courtrooms with distinction for over thirty years now and he is now a leading consultant in several areas of practice in Uganda. He has meritoriously earned the title of "Senior Counsel" in the Courts of Uganda and his outstanding scholarly record has made him a leading authority in Uganda on matters relating to Revenue Law and Taxation, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Conveyance and General Litigation. He is one of the most respected and most widely consulted lawyers in Uganda.
Nicole Töpperwien
In January 2007 Nicole Töpperwien, founded the consulting company “State Concepts”. From 2003 to 2006 she was attached to the Swiss Expert Pool for Civilian Peace-building of the Political Division IV (Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs) and worked as an advisor for decentralisation and administration reform for the Macedonian government. Until 2003 she was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Federalism in Switzerland. After having graduated from the University of Fribourg, she obtained her PhD in law and a master (ll.m.) from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, NYC, USA.
Nicole Töpperwien has worked as an expert and consultant on various aspects of constitution-making federalism, decentralisation, power-sharing, inclusion of non-majority groups in state institutions and democratic processes, and conflict transformation. Since 2006 she gave inputs for the political reform processes in Nepal, the Philippines, Kosovo and Bolivia. Furthermore, she participated in the preparation of Operational Guidance Notes on “Decentralisation and Autonomy in Mediation Processes” and “Federalism in Mediation Processes” in a joint Swiss-UN project and is co-authoring a Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs mandated study on “Power-sharing: Lessons learned from the Swiss experience”. Additionally, Nicole Töpperwien is active in the academic field and has acted as Deputy Secretary General of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL) from 2003-2004. She was teaching at several summer universities and actively participates in international conferences and publishes in the fields of federalism, decentralisation and the accommodation of non-majority groups.
International IDEA
Melanie Allen
Melanie Allen is an Assistant Programme Officer in the Constitution Building Processes programme of International IDEA. Her work focuses on policy development for international partnerships and constitution building. Prior to joining the CBP programme, she worked in the Political Parties programme on issues related to the internal functioning of political parties and on the South Asia region component.She later joined the Electoral Processes programme. She has held internships with IFES and the International Labour Organization. She holds an A.B. in Government from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts and completed coursework at the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.
Markus Böckenförde
Markus Böckenförde is a Programme Officer for the Constitution Building Programme at International IDEA, Stockholm, Sweden. Before joining IDEA, he was the Head of the Africa Projetcs and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and Intrenational Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg for several years. In 2006 to 2007, he was seconded by the German Foreign Office to the Assessment and Evaluation Commission (AEC) in Sudan as its Legal Expert. The AEC has been mandated to support and supervise the implementation of the Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Dr Böckenförde holds a law degree and a doctor degree from the University of Minnesota. He also holds the equivalent of a Bachelor degree in political science. He has published widely in the area of constitution building and is the co-author on several Max Planck Manuals used as training materials for Max Planck projects. He has worked as a consultant for UNDP, GTZ, the German Foreign Office, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
Jenny Isberg
Jenny Isberg is Administrative Assistant in the Constitution Building Processes Programme at International IDEA. Prior to joining IDEA, she was a translator in the Embassy of Tanzania in Stockholm for nearly six years. Ms Isberg’s experiences in the Philippines include Market Research Supervisor in Duty Free Philippines (1994-1997); Community Development Officer in an NGO which was providing livelihood projects to the victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1993; PR representative and newsletter contributor (later editor) in the Canadian-Filipino owned Marcopper Mining Company in 1991-1993; and Development Management Officer for a UNDP-funded project on poverty alleviation at the National Economic and Development Agency (NEDA). Ms Isberg holds a Masters degree in Swedish Social Studies under the International Graduate Program of Stockholm University, 2000 and a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of the Philippines. She also attended the MBA Program at Ateneo de Manila University and has a Diploma in Journalism and Professional Writing.
Edward Shalala
Edward Shalala is the Head of the Design of Democratic Institutions and Processes (DDIP) Programme at International IDEA. DDIP comprises the Constitution Building, Political Parties and Electoral Processes thematic components, as well as the ACE Project on electoral processes. Previously, he was the Sector Advisor for Resource Based Industries in the Department of Economic Development and Tourism of the Provincial Government of the Western Cape in South Africa. Mr Shalala served as Election Manager for the African National Congress in the central Cape Town area for the first democratic election in South Africa (1994). He was also the Head of the Community Liaison Department of the country’s Constitutional Assembly (1994-1996).
Mr Shalala developed the communication strategy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of South Africa. He also conceptualised and implemented the national media campaign to launch the Commission’s first public hearings. Mr Shalala’s other professional experience includes positions as manager, public policy adviser, researcher, legal adviser and lobbyist especially in the area of Marine Living Resources.
Winluck Wahiu
Winluck Wahiu is a lawyer who joined International IDEA in September 2006 and became the Project Manager for the Constitutional Building Processes Programme in October 2008. Previously (2001 -2005), he worked as the Programme Officer of the African Human Rights and Access to Justice Programme, a regional initiative of the Kenyan and Swedish Sections in collaboration with the Geneva Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurists. He managed the Programme’s work in 16 Africa countries to support the national implementation of international human rights standards through funding litigation and framing legal opinions on comparative constitutional law and practice for national litigation teams. He was involved in technical legal team advising the Kenyan bipartisan parliamentary consensus committee on the constitution making process leading to a referendum on the draft constitution in 2005. He was also involved in constitutional amendment process in Uganda and the legal drafting process in Swaziland after being invited in both cases by umbrella civil society organizations.