Tabeth Masengu

Tabeth Masengu is an admitted Attorney of the High Court of South Africa and currently a Senior Researcher at the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit (DGRU) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She is also a PhD Research Fellow pursuing a joint Doctorate degree with the University of Ghent in Belgium and the University of Cape Town. Her PhD research examines the informal and formal aspects that inform the equal representation of men and women on the judicial bench.

She graduated from Rhodes University in South Africa with an LLB (Cum laude) in 2006 and was later admitted as an attorney of the High Court of South Africa in 2010. She later obtained an LLM in Human Rights Law (Cum laude) from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.

Tabeth’s current areas of expertise are women in the judiciary and the legal profession and women’s rights and constitutionalism. Tabeth pioneered and leads the gender arm of the judicial governance work of DGRU, and has since gone on to publish and speak at numerous international and regional conferences.

Her peer- reviewed academic publications include women’s rights and the Zambian constitutional process, customary law inheritance in Botswana; gender, the judiciary and the legal profession in South Africa and the vulnerability of African judges on the continent. She has also written for various newspapers and has featured on both television and radio programmes.

She is a recipient of the Special Research Fund for joint doctorates scholarship from Ghent for a period of 12 months.

She has conducted judicial training for judges in Tanzania on behalf of Equality Now a Kenyan based NGO and is an annual speaker at the South African Chapter of the International Association of Women Judges AGM.