Professor Ann Skelton has worked as a children’s rights lawyer in South Africa for over 25 years. She played a leading role in child law reform through her involvement with the committees of the South African Law Reform Commission that drafted the Child Justice Act and the Children’s Act. Ann was the Director of the Centre for Child Law for ten years, and initiated its strategic impact litigation work. She is currently a Law Professor at the University of Pretoria, where she also holds the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair: Education Law in Africa. She is an internationally recognised researcher and has published widely on children’s rights, education law and restorative justice. She holds a B1 rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). In addition to teaching Child Law and Education Law at the University of Pretoria, she teaches in the Masters in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde. In 2019 she spent periods of teaching and research at the Global Campus on Human Rights in Venice, at the University of Leiden in the Department of Children’s Rights, and as a visiting academic at the Bonavero Institute, Oxford.
Prof Skelton was previously the Director of the Centre for Child Law where she pioneered strategic litigation on children’s rights. She is an admitted Advocate of the High Court, and has appeared as counsel in many landmark child law cases in the South African superior courts, including 12 cases in the Constitutional Court.
Her awards include the Honourary Worlds’ Children’s Prize, presented by Queen Sylvia of Sweden (2012) and the Juvenile Justice Without Borders award presented by the International Observatory on Juvenile Justice (2017) and she is currently an International Ambassador for the British Society of Criminology. She was the chairperson of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of their Liberty. Prof Skelton is currently a member of the United Nation (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child, serving her second term of office which started in 2021.
