Law Professor and UNESCO Chair, University of Pretoria
Dr. Ann Skelton has worked as a children’s rights lawyer in South Africa for over 25 years. She played a leading role in child law reform with the committees of the South African Law Reform Commission that drafted the Child Justice Act and the Children’s Act. She was the Director of the Centre for Child Law for 10 years and initiated its strategic impact litigation work. She is currently a Law Professor at the University of Pretoria, where she also holds a UNESCO chair.
She is an internationally recognized researcher who has published widely on children’s rights, education law, and restorative justice. In addition to teaching Child Law and Education Law at the University of Pretoria, she teaches in the Master’s in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. She is an advocate and has appeared as counsel in landmark child law cases in the South African superior courts, including 12 cases in the Constitutional Court.
Her awards include the Honourary Worlds’ Children’s Prize, presented by Queen Sylvia of Sweden (2012) and the Juvenile Justice Without Borders award presented by the International Observatory on Juvenile Justice (2017). She is currently an International Ambassador for the British Society of Criminology. She was the chairperson of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of their Liberty. She is currently a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Her term of office started in 2017.
Learn about Ann Skelton’s work:
Child Justice in South Africa (2008) with B. Tshehla
Restorative Justice as a Framework for Juvenile Justice Reform: A South African Perspective. (2002)
