Charles Ngwena

Charles Ngwena, LLB (Wales), LLM (Wales), LLD (Free State), Barrister-at-Law, is a Research Scholar at Yale for the academic years 2022-24, with the support of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women's Rights. He is Professor of Law in the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Charles has published extensively on issues at the intersection between human rights and health, including HIV/AIDS and reproductive and sexual health with a focus on the African region. He also works in the fields of disability rights, and race, culture and sexualities.

He serves as the Convening Editor of the African Disability Rights Yearbook, Section Editor of Developing World Bioethics (for Law and Bioethics) and ethical and legal associate editor of the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics. He is co-editor of Employment equity law (Butterworths); co-editor of Health and human rights (Ashgate, 2007); and co-editor of Strengthening sexual and reproductive rights in the African region through human rights (Pretoria University Law Press, 2014). He is the author of What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities (Pretoria University Law Press, 2018) which was awarded the University of Pretoria Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Scholarly books.

Charles has taught at universities in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and the United States, Swaziland and South Africa. His research and teaching interests straddle across sexual and reproductive health and rights, disability, race and culture. He has initiated and directed Masters and doctoral programmes on sexual and reproductive health and rights and disability at universities in South Africa. In 2008, he was shortlisted for the position of UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health. He teaches on Gender, Sexuality and International Human Rights at a Summer School course convened annually by the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights, Oxford University.