Louis Theodor Christian Harms (born 11 October 1941) is a South African judge who served as deputy president of the Supreme Court of Appeal and Professor Extraordinary for Intellectual Property Law at the University of Pretoria.
Asked by President F.W.DeKlerk to investigate the State controlled death squads and political murders he set up what is known as the Harms Commission of Inquiry (Feb-Sept 1990).
Suspected collusion with the apartheid state was implied after the release of the final report which denied the existence of death squads contradicted later by the mountains of evidence to the contrary uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The records at WITS University concluded: "The Harms Commission report, which was released in September 1990, failed to name any special units of the army or police, let alone any individual officers, as participants in the death squads.
Harms was project leader on six criminal procedure issues from 1999 to 2003, and the chairman and sole member of four judicial commissions of inquiry in South Africa (1988 to 1990) – three dealing with corruption and related matters, and the other with political murders and other violent acts.