Rights of Children with Disabilities in Africa

Leading expert on the international and regional legal standards on the human rights of children, Professor Benyam Dawit Mezmur, will deliver a lecture at this HPOD event on April 13th at 12 noon US Eastern, co-organized with the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program (HRP) and International Legal Studies, Harvard University Center for African Studies, as well as the University of the Western Cape.

Professor Mezmur, from Ethiopia, is the new Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow at HRP, and is a Professor of Law at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, where he coordinates the Children’s Rights Project at the Dullah Omar Institute for Constitutional Law, Governance, and Human Rights. He has produced timely and incisive scholarship on the rights of children in Africa, including "The African Children’s Charter @ 30: A distinction without a difference?" for The International Journal of Children's Rights, "Taking measures without taking measurements? An insider's reflections on monitoring the implementation of the African Children's Charter in a changing context of armed conflict" for the International Review of the Red Cross, and "A Step to Zero Attacks: Reflections on the Rights of Persons with Albinism through the Lens of X v United Republic of Tanzania" for the African Disability Rights Yearbook, among many others.

Professor Mezmur is currently a member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, having served as the Committee's chairperson from 2015-2017. He has also served as the chairperson of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child twice (from 2012-2014 and 2015-2017), where he has been a memebr for over a decade. In 2018 Pope Francis appointed him to serve on the Pontifical Commission on the Protection of Minors.