Cj Botha

Biography

Christo Botha is professor of public law.  He holds the degrees LLB (Pret) Hons BA (International Politics) (Unisa) LLD (Unisa). The title of his LLD thesis was “Waarde-aktiverende grondwetuitleg: vergestalting van die materiële regstaat” (Value-activating constitutional interpretation: embodiment of the substantive constitutional state). He was admitted as advocate of the High Court of South Africa in 1982. He joined the Department of Constitutional and Public International Law, UNISA in 1980 as student assistant. In 1981 he was appointed as lecturer, promoted to senior lecturer in 1984 and associate professor in 1997. In 2000 he was appointed as full professor in the Department of Public Law, University of Pretoria, and was the head of the department from 2001 to 2009. Christo Botha is a member of the International Association of Constitutional Law (ICLA), the International Bar Association (IBA), the South African branch of the International Law Association (SABILA) and the ICRC Contact Group for Teachers of International Humanitarian Law in Southern Africa. He is also a member of the editorial board of the African Yearbook on International Humanitarian Law. In 2010 he was inducted as a fellow of the Salzburg Global Conference. During September 2007 he attended the Summer School in Legislative Informatics and XML at the European University Institute in Fiesole (Florence), Italy. The seminar aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant emerging ICT standards for legislation, an understanding of their impact on the different phases of the legislative process, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant (and machine-readable) documents throughout the law-making process. In 2002 he received a grant from the International Committee of the Red Cross (in conjunction with the Graduate Institute of International Studies and the Karl Popper Foundation) for a training seminar for university professors in International Humanitarian Law in Geneva, Switzerland.

Research Interest

His main areas of interest are constitutional and statutory interpretation, military law, legislative drafting, international criminal law and international humanitarian law.