Michelo Kennedy Hansungule was Professor of Human Rights Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa from 2004 up to his retirement a few years ago. For many years, he was an esteemed and respected part of the Centre team. He was a Zambian by birth, but an African at heart. In his teaching, research and interactions, he was the embodiment of the ‘African personality’.
He passed away on Friday 13 September aged 70 and will be buried on Tuesday 16 September at his home in Choma, Zambia. A tree has fallen! The great Iroko tree has fallen.
When he joined the Centre for Human Rights as a permanent ‘full’ professor in 2004, he was one of the first black professors in the Faculty of Law. He broke new ground by becoming a role model for many young students. Michelo brought with him very accomplished academic credentials. In addition to studying law at the University of Zambia (where he obtained the degrees LLB and LLM), he holds an LLM from the University of Graz, and a doctorate (PhD) from the University of Vienna.
He has taught international human rights law at universities worldwide including the University of Lund in Sweden, Mahidol University in Thailand, Essex University in the United Kingdom, University of Abo in Finland and the University of Malta. He has taught in outreach programmes in around 50 countries on human rights protection to judges, lawyers, governments and NGO officials.
Michelo was an activist-academic. He remained involved in domestic politics in Zambia, and played a prominent role in numerous international organisations. One of the best illustrations of the high esteem in which he was held, is his membership as Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), where he served for three terms from 2011 to 2023 as one of its Commissioners.
He was passionate about the plight of human rights in Africa, and was actively involved as consultant, advisor, academic, activist and litigator. He was a member of the independent technical team established to measure the compliance of countries with the governance and human rights requirements of the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). He also served as an Independent Expert Member of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and as Board Member for Minority Rights Group International. In 2013, he led SADC Lawyers Election Observer Missions in Zimbabwe and Swaziland.
Michelo was a teacher without comparison. He had perfected the art of teaching law through story-telling. For many years, he taught on various Centre programmes. Students from the Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa (HRDA) and Multidisciplinary Human Rights, in particular, were held spellbound by his singular ability to weave together personal anecdotes, erudition and common sense.
His name has a special place in the children’s rights in Africa. Indeed, the very first communication (complaint) submitted to the African Children’s Rights Committee is Michelo Hansungule and Others (on behalf of Children in Northern Uganda) v Uganda. This complaint, which concerns the use of child soldiers by the government in the context of the conflict involving the Lord’s Resistance Army, was prepared by students on the Human Rights Clinic of the HRDA programme, who worked under his supervision.
In the Centre, he was recognised – and taken advantage of – as a consummate human rights all-rounder. He was the ‘go-to’ presenter at countless Centre events, always ready to share his wide-ranging insights based on a mixture of personal experience, research and reflection. His field of expertise was expansive, and ranged from socio-economic rights, children’s rights, democracy in Africa, elections and election monitoring, UN and AU human rights, and transitional justice. But no subject was closer to his heart than the right to development. Within the Centre, he took responsibility for putting together and overseeing an long-running annual one-week advanced human rights course on this topic. This was a landmark course, which starkly affirmed his conviction that the right to development was justiciable and a practical avenue to alleviate poverty and underdevelopment.
Michelo excelled as a supervisor. He was an inspiring and challenging mentor to many. In addition to the more than hundred Master’s dissertations over the years, he accompanied more than 25 doctoral students to completion. It is testimony to his inspirational mentoring that a number of these doctoral graduates (including now Professors Serges Kamga; Innocent Maja; Azubike Onoura; Ademola Jegede) have become respected academic leaders in their own right; and that one of his masters by research students, Duncan Gaswaga, was recently elected to the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. Inspired by Professor Hansungule, many of these students focused on aspects of the right to development. Many of this cohort of doctoral students, which could be termed the ‘Pretoria Right to Development Scholars’, have subsequently made significant contributions to a burgeoning scholarship on the right to development in Africa.
He has written a number of publications on human rights, human rights law and diverse legal subjects.
Professor Frans Viljoen, Director (2007 to 2023) remarked: ‘The Centre remembers, recognises, honours and thanks Professor Michelo Hansungule, a warm and wise human being, a true son of the African soil, for the substantial part he played in establishing the Centre as a leading African human rights institution.’
