Johann Kriegler
Both before and after his retirement, he was active in international engagements on electoral disputes and judicial independence, notably as chairperson of Kenya's Kriegler Commission in 2008.
[2] He matriculated in 1949 at the King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and attended the South African Military Academy for two years thereafter.
[3] In 1954, he graduated with a BA degree from the University of Pretoria,[4] where he was politically active as an opponent of the apartheid-era National Party government.
[3] He was a prominent trial lawyer with a varied client list that included poet Breyten Breytenbach, homeland leaders Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Lucas Mangope, activist cleric Beyers Naudé, white politicians Eschel Rhoodie and Eugene Terreblanche, and the Church of Scientology.
[7] In December 1993, during the final stages of the negotiations to end apartheid, Kriegler was appointed as chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, which was tasked with administering South African's first elections under universal suffrage.
[4] The elections were held less than six months later, on 26 April 1994, despite ongoing political violence and a short-lived boycott by the Inkatha Freedom Party.
[2] He was among the 11 judges sworn into the apex court's inaugural bench on 14 February 1995,[10] and he served there until he retired from the judiciary on 29 November 2002, his 70th birthday.
[4] The Mail & Guardian regarded him ultimately as "a flamboyant maverick" comfortable with confronting the executive branch,[12] pointing to his minority opinions in President v Hugo and Du Plessis v De Klerk as examples of his judicial "boldness".
[8] During and after his stint at the South African Electoral Commission, Kriegler was also involved in democracy promotion initiatives abroad: he participated in a National Democratic Institute mission to Angola in 1999; in International Commission of Jurists missions on judicial independence in Palestine (2002) and Malawi (2002); and judicial and advocacy training in various other countries.
[17] After his retirement in November 2002, Kriegler spent two further years training South African aspirant judges, prosecutors, and advocates,[1] in which capacity he co-drafted the judicial code of conduct.
[2] He has also served as a trustee for a number of charitable organisations, including the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, the AIDS Law Project and SECTION27, the Constitutional Court Trust, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems.
[18] During the organisation's official launch in September 2009, Kriegler announced that FUL would seek judicial review of the Judicial Service Commission's recent decision to drop its investigation into Cape Judge President John Hlophe, who was accused of attempting to influence the Constitutional Court's decision in Thint v NDPP, a politically sensitive case.
It's impossible to live with a very clear patronising attitude toward black people, which has become a recurring theme in his [Kriegler's] statements.
In July 2022, in a ruling penned by Judge Dumisani Zondi, the Judicial Conduct Committee found against Kriegler, ordering him to retract his statement.
[1][2] In 2008, he chaired the Kriegler Commission, established to recommend electoral reforms in Kenya following the 2007 presidential election and subsequent political crisis;[29] and in 2010 he and Safwat Sidqi were the international members whom Afghan President Hamid Karzai appointed to the Electoral Complaints Commission which adjudicated disputes arising from the 2010 Afghan parliamentary election.
[30] In 2003, the General Council of the Bar of South Africa presented Kriegler with its Sydney and Felicia Kentridge Award for Service to Law in Southern Africa,[4] and in 2011, he received the International Foundation for Electoral Systems's Charles T. Manatt Democracy Award for outstanding commitment to democracy and human rights.
