Joint PhD fellowship 2017-2018 at Ghent University
Tabeth Masengu was a joint Doctoral Researcher with UGent and the University of Cape Town, until 15 May 2020, then she obtained her doctoral degree in Law.
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, after completing her articles of clerkship and Board exams. She worked in an a human rights NGO, before obtaining an LLM in Human Rights Law (Cum laude) from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.
Until July 2019, Tabeth was a Senior Researcher at the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit (DGRU) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She pioneered and led the gender arm of the judicial governance work that DGRU focuses on women in the judiciary and legal profession. This project required a combination of research and advocacy work both domestically and regionally. She also led the Women Pioneer Programme, funded by the Norwegian embassy which seeks to capacitate and empower women law students and magistrates.
She has also conducted judicial training for/ and or facilitated workshops for judges in Tanzania and Uganda . She was annual speaker at the South African Chapter of the International Association of Women Judges AGM and was previously the Co-Convenor of the Women, Equality and Constitutionalism group of the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers. She also previously served as the Southern African Correspondent for the Oxford University Human Rights Hub.
Tabeth was a recipient of a Special Research Fund (BOF) for joint doctorates scholarship from Ghent for a period of 12 months, between 2017-2018. Her PhD research examines how informal and formal aspects of the appointment process, inform the equal representation of men and women on the judicial bench.
Her research interests include gender and judging, women’s rights and the law, judicial governance and constitutionalism and equality.
Her publications include topics such as gender and judging and women in the legal profession in South-Africa, women, constitutional rights and judicial appointments in Zambia, the vulnerability of judges and in customary law inheritance in Botswana.
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