 I was born and lived most of my life in South Africa. My formative years as a teenager was during apartheid. When the Soweto uprising took place in 1976, I was completing my high school. I saw firsthand the brutality of the apartheid police. Students were often demonstrating against the apartheid, against the injustice of the apartheid, against the arrest, detention of students, the torture, the killings that were taking place. And I joined those demonstrations. And the moment that really made me very angry was when the police officer chased a pregnant student down an embankment. And as she fell, he beat her with his baiting. And at that moment I realized that I felt a sense of helplessness, a sense that I couldn't help her, I couldn't help myself. It was that moment that triggered me from realizing that I had to do something. And that made me realize that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. Growing up in South Africa in an apartheid system that was riddled with injustice from the time you were born, until the time you died, that level of injustice was a systemic, designed injustice that was intended to keep black people under the feet of whites of Africans. And seeing that injustice propelled me to become a human rights lawyer. And of course, in South Africa at the time, we could not study human rights. Human rights was not offered as a university course. It was forbidden. I had to go to the U.S. to do my masters in human rights. And when I returned, the situation was changing a bit. I returned around 1989. The situation was changing a bit. There was talk of the release of Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years and other leaders of the ANC. So the legal avenue was the best avenue in terms of redressing the violence that has perpetuated by the apartheid system. The apartheid system was incredibly violent. I was very fortunate in that I received training in the U.S. I was able to work in the U.K. And I brought that knowledge back to South Africa to help me to fight the injustice through my work in human rights. Another important aspect was to empower people. And I was involved in human rights education, train people at the grassroots level. Part of what drives me in human rights is trying to make that small difference in people's lives. The voice of the UN is incredibly powerful in an environment with considerable amount of conflict, of strife, of civil unrest and suffering. I think the UN's voice has to be constant on the side of victims of human rights violations. For me, the most exciting moments are when I'm conducting an investigation on the ground. I'm in the field, in the place where violations have occurred. And I'm meeting with victims and witnesses and people who have gone through incredibly traumatic events, either themselves having suffered serious injury or harm or psychological trauma, or having seen some of the family members being injured or maimed or killed. It humbles me, it humbles me to speak to such people because they selflessly share their stories and they share the grief and they share the evidence with us in the hope that something will change tomorrow. Sometimes we betray them because we take that information. We put it in the public report and then nothing happens. For me, that is the most disheartening part of my job. I know that my role in the human rights field is limited. The role of UN human rights is limited. But the political actors out there who have the power and the ability to do something, repeatedly fail victims, repeatedly fail those who have gone through a traumatic situation and place all their hope in those governments, those institutions that can really do something. What is most rewarding for me is when pieces of a puzzle fall together. For me, an investigation is like a puzzle. When you're collecting pieces of information from individuals, from evidence that you see on the ground, the sight of a human rights violation, from documentary information and pieces fall in place. When I was doing the investigation in Libya at the time that Gaddafi was overthrown, one of those instances was when I interviewed a teacher who had been detained in the midst of summer in a shipping container and was repeatedly beaten. I saw the injuries. I saw the marks on his back. We had a medical doctor who confirmed that the marks were consistent with his testimony that he was beaten with a rod. We went and we found the room where he was tortured. We found the cable ties with which he was tied. We found the piece of fabric with which he was blindfolded. The immensity of the suffering that he experienced was palpable in that room as we stood there with him pointing out all the evidence, the physical evidence in that room of his torture. He told me about the person who tortured him. He described him in quite detail. He gave me his name and the town from which he came and I recorded all of this faithfully. I owed it to him that I recorded his testimony faithfully. Several months later on a return trip to Libya, we by accident ended up at a prison run by an armed group and in there the commanding officer told us that there was a prisoner who had confessed to raping women. He had been a soldier in the Gaddafi regime and a guard called out the soldier's name and I recognized the name and as he walked towards me, I recognized the description the teacher had given me. When I questioned him about him beating prisoners in this detention facility, he confessed and he clearly remembered the teacher he had tortured and he said that he had done it because he was commanded by his superior officers to do so. That record may help to bring to justice perpetrators of heinous crimes as we have seen in Sweden, in Germany where Syrian asylum seekers have been prosecuted for torture committed in Syria on the basis of testimonies that the United Nations has gathered. Justice and accountability is a long arduous process. It often takes many, many decades before justice is achieved. Many victims or witnesses live many decades and die and still don't see justice. This is not the fault of human rights or human rights investigators or human rights investigations. The responsibility lies with the political powers that do not have the political will to investigate and prosecute serious international crimes. Human rights are universal. They are not the prerogative of the rich or the wealthy or the educated or just of human rights activists. Human rights knowledge and education is incredibly empowering ensuring that communities and community organizations empower themselves and empower those around them. Right now there's an urgency for us to deal with human rights situations.