On 10 February, the Regional Office for Southern Africa of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (ROSA) launched a Human Rights Resource Centre at the Oliver Tambo Law Library at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

The inauguration ceremony took place on the occasion of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Class of the LLM in Human Rights and Democratization in Africa, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights of the University of Pretoria.

The establishment of the Human Rights Resource Centre at the University of Pretoria is part of a larger project whereby ROSA aims to establish human rights resource centres in the Southern African countries overseen by ROSA. The establishment of the next human rights resource centre will be in Maputo, Mozambique, as part of the Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Law at the Universidade E. Mondlane, and is scheduled to take place in the first quarter of 2012.

The Human Rights Resource Centres, once established, will contribute to the promotion of human rights in Southern Africa by providing easy access to human rights related resource materials for the general public, human rights defenders and researchers. They will also serve as reference centres for OHCHR publications.