About me
Ms. Gay MacDougall is Vice-Chair of the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and its focal point for EMLER. She was the first UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues and Special Rapporteur on the issue of systematic rape and sexual slavery practices in armed conflict from 1995 to 1999 and played a leadership role in the UN Third World Conference against Racism held in Durban in 2001.
Ms. McDougall was a member of the South African governmental body created to administer its first democratic, non-racial elections in 1994, which resulted in the historic election of President Nelson Mandela. Prior to that appointment, she served for 15 years as Director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, working closely with South African lawyers to secure the release of thousands of political prisoners from jail. The Government of South Africa bestowed on her their national medal of honor, the Order of O.R.Tambo Medal for her extraordinary contributions to ending apartheid.
She was also executive director of Global Rights, which worked with human rights advocates in 10 countries around the world to develop their strategies for justice.
Ms. McDougall is a distinguished scholar in residence at Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, Fordham University School of Law. She earned a JD at Yale Law School, an LLM in public international law at the London School of Economics and Politics, and a BA in social science at Bennington College. She has honorary Doctor of Law degrees from six universities including the University to Witwatersrand (South Africa).
