Human Rights Council President appoints Tshepo Madlingozi of South Africa as Chair of Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement

The President of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Sidharto R. Suryodipuro (Indonesia), has appointed Tshepo Madlingozi (South Africa) to serve as Chair of the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement (EMLER).

Mr. Madlingozi succeeds Akua Kuenyehia (Ghana), who resigned as a member and Chair of the Expert Mechanism on 9 February 2026. Ms. Kuenyehia had served as a member and Chair since her appointment on 15 March 2024.

Mr. Madlingozi’s academic roles have included lecturing in jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria and directing the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he also taught social justice and human rights.

For more than 13 years, he served as national advocacy coordinator and a board member of the Khulumani Support Group, representing more than 85,000 victims and survivors of apartheid-era gross human rights violations and advocating for reparations, redress and sustainable reconciliation. He has also undertaken consultancy work for the Pan-African Parliament and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, including research on international standards against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

He currently holds academic positions at Stellenbosch University and Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He was also a faculty member of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights in Austria.

Mr. Madlingozi is a Commissioner at the South African Human Rights Commission, an independent constitutional body, and holds Master’s degrees in sociology and in law, as well as a PhD in law.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of United Nations: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).