Christof Heyns passed away yesterday at the age of 62.\u00a0 From 2010-2016, Christof was the UN expert on the death penalty (his official title was the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions). In that role, he intervened in dozens\u2014perhaps hundreds\u2014of death penalty cases, calling on governments to stay the executions of prisoners around the world. Like all UN experts, he worked behind the scenes, as UN rules demanded that his communications with governments remain confidential. But he was an adamant opponent of capital punishment and was always willing to do what he could to help our clients, even if he knew that the chance a Texas governor would listen to a UN expert was\u00a0smaller than a snowball\u2019s chance in hell.<\/p>\n
Unlike many human rights lawyers of his stature, Christof retained a warmth, graciousness and intellectual curiosity that endeared him to many of us who were lucky to work with him. He was always willing to sign an amicus brief or brainstorm a new project. His generosity was all the more noteworthy given the multiple hats he wore:\u00a0 he was a beloved professor of\u00a0Human Rights Law and Director of the\u00a0highly regarded Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. He served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2017-2020, where he was one of the principal drafters, alongside Nigel Rodley, of\u00a0General Comment 36<\/a>\u00a0dealing with the death penalty.\u00a0General Comment 36 was a watershed in international law regarding the death penalty. \u00a0At the time of his death, he was conceiving of a new database that would catalog, among other things, all state legislation and jurisprudence of national courts implementing the decisions of human rights bodies, as a way of illustrating how human rights law is implemented at a local level. It was extremely important to him to include death penalty jurisprudence in this project, as he believed (rightly) that many of the global reforms in death penalty practices were attributable, at least in part, to norms developed by international human rights bodies.<\/p>\n