Tseliso Thipanyane
Tseliso Thipanyane is the Chief Executive Officer of the South African Human Rights Commission and former chief executive officer of the Safer South Africa Foundation.
He has spent over 13 years in the SAHRC as head of research, mainly responsible for the monitoring of economic and social rights and access to information rights, before becoming the chief executive officer. Adding to this, he is a former researcher on criminal justice at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and former law lecturer at the University of the Western Cape (criminal procedure), Columbia University Law School, New York (African human rights systems), Ramapo College of New Jersey (African politics and Human Rights).
Tseliso Thipanyane has numerous publications on human rights issues and has presented conference papers in over twenty countries in Africa, Europe, America and Asia. Admitted as an advocate of the High Court of Lesotho and South Africa and served on the project committee on child justice of the then SA Law Commission. Member of the Executive Committee of the Council for the Advancement of South Africa’s Constitution (CASAC), and former board member of the Open Democracy Advise Centre (ODAC).
Listen to Tseliso Thipanyane speak at the conference
Session 4: New Solutions for tech for democracy and human rights: bringing in global and local voices
The session is jointly facilitated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Global Focus and will be kicked off by Executive Director of the Togolese Civil League, Farida Nabourema, followed by a message from the UNDP Administrator, Achim Steiner. Based on a series of roundtables with Southern Voice, a network of +50 think tanks in the Global South, and a scan of the horizon for some of the most promising pro-democracy digital projects taking place today, the session takes the audience on a roundtrip across the globe to present key challenges and approaches on how to make digital technology a vehicle for democracy and human rights.