LEGAL EXCELLENCE: Katherine O’Regan receives George Bizos Human Rights Award, warns of shift to authoritarianism

On 15 October, former Constitutional Court Justice Katherine O’Regan received the George Bizos Human Rights Award, reflecting on the project of democracy and urging resistance to rising authoritarianism.

Former Constitutional Court Justice Katherine O’Regan received the fifth George Bizos Human Rights Award from the Legal Resources Centre on Thursday, 15 October.

“The George Bizos award was established to recognise individuals whose life’s work reflects the courageous spirit, relentless integrity, and constitutional devotion of George,” said Nersan Govender, the national director of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), in the opening address.

George Bizos fled Nazi-occupied Greece as a 13-year-old, with his father, and arrived in South Africa as a refugee. Bizos served on the defence team during the Rivonia Trial for Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. He represented the families of political activists killed in detention, such as Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol, Neil Aggett and the Cradock Four (Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto, and Sicelo Mhlauli). He also helped draft South Africa’s interim constitution and the Bill of Rights in the early 1990s.

Bizos joined the Legal Resources Centre in 1991. By 1995, he had led the argument that successfully declared the death penalty unconstitutional. He represented families seeking accountability in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and during the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

O’Regan was a cub reporter at the Cape Argus in the summer of 1976, a turbulent time in apartheid, when other journalists – including her editor – suggested a law degree would aid her work. She left to go study further, and just kept going, she told Daily Maverick.

She received a PhD from the London School of Economics, and thereafter practised as an attorney in Johannesburg in labour law and land rights law, representing trade unions and communities facing evictions. In the early 1990s, she was a founding member of the University of Cape Town’s Law, Race and Gender Research Unit and moved from being a senior lecturer at UCT’s Faculty of Law to an associate professor.

In 1994, at age 37, she was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the newly formed Constitutional Court, and served there for 15 years.

From 2010 to 2016, she served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia. Since 2016, she has been a director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.

“I do feel very privileged to have been able to see different aspects of working as a lawyer, so both as a practitioner, as an academic, on the Bench, and then [the] range of advisory, board work , mediation and arbitration. It has given me a perspective of a legal career which not every lawyer gets.”

Reflecting back on her career, she told Daily Maverick that working with extraordinary senior lawyers as a junior lawyer, and then a young judge, and now working with much younger lawyers had been wonderful.

“This intergenerational exchange, which I think is characteristic of the legal profession, is one of its enormously rewarding aspects.