Former Constitutional Court judge Yvonne Mokgoro, Rest in Peace
Yvonne Mokgoro. Photo: Wikipedia
The late former Constitutional Court judge Yvonne Mokgoro, who died on May 9 at the age of 73, will be buried on Thursday, May 23, from Bryanston Catholic church in Johannesburg, a day after her Requiem Mass there.
A memorial service was held in her hometown of Kimberley at St Boniface church in Galeshewe on Tuesday.
Mokgoro served on the Constitutional Court from October 1994 to October 2009. She also chaired the South African Law Reform Commission between 1995 and 2011.
Born on October 19, 1950, in Galeshewe, she was the first of her siblings to matriculate, having been educated at a Catholic school, St Boniface.
Initially she wanted to become a teacher. “My teachers were Dominican nuns, and those were the people who one saw as models of what you want to do one day… So I always thought I wanted to be a teacher… I always had the idea that I would work with people. I knew that because I loved working with people. Although I grew up as a very shy girl… I always knew that I would want to work with people,” she later recalled.
“That was the influence that came from being daily within an environment where you had women around you. Right from the principal to the person who assists the principal, the teachers, everybody, they were all women.”
However, she first worked as a nursing assistant until Robert Sobukwe, a lawyer and founder of the Pan African Congress who had been banished to Galeshewe by the apartheid regime, defended Yvinne on a charge of obstruction of justice, laid after she intervened to object when the police arrested a young man for loitering.
Sobukwe encouraged the young woman to become a lawyer. While working full-time work and caring for her young children, Mokgoro studied towards her a BJuris degree at the University of Bophuthatswana (now the North-West University), graduating in 1982 and earning an LLB in 1984.
She was appointed to lecture in the University of Bophuthatswana’s Department of Jurisprudence, eventually becoming an associate professor. She also earned two LLMs, one from the University of Bophuthatswana (1987) and another at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in (1990).
From 1992-93, she was an associate professor in law at the University of the Western Cape.
In October 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Mokgoro to the newly-established Constitutional Court. She was the first black woman to join the bench and, along with Kate O’Regan, one of only two women overall. She served a full 15-year term, retiring in October 2009.
After her retirement from the bench in 2009, she held various trusteeships, and from 2013-18, she was an official advocate for social cohesion in South Africa.
Mokgoro chaired the South African Law Reform Commission, and served on the benches of both Lesotho and Namibia. She was a member of the International Council of Arbitration for Sport, and chaired the United Nations Internal Justice Council,
In December 2021, Mokgoro was appointed to chair the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Racial Justice Body, established to examine systemic racism in law enforcement and criminal justice. She served a three-year term on the panel.
In April 2023, Makgoro was seriously injured in a car crash.
After her death, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared that Mokgoro, an Esteemed Member of the Order of the Baobab, would be honoured with a Special Official Funeral Category 1.
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