Tashwill Esterhuizen, graduate from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and heads the LGBTI and Sex workers Rights Programme at the Southern Africa litigation Centre (SALC). He has been admitted as an attorney of the High Court of South Africa since 2011. In 2017, he was selected as a fellow for the Mandela Washington (MWF) for his work on LGBT rights in Africa. He has extensive experience in public interest and human rights litigation and advocacy in ten Southern Africa. Prior to SALC he was employed as a litigation attorney at the Socio-Economic Institute of South Africa (SERI), where he assisted communities and social movements through engaging with government and other organisations on their behalf on a range of socio-economic related issues and providing them with, inter alia, legal assistance.
He has done several guest lectures and participated in various panel discussion on issues affecting marginalised persons, including a conference at New York Law School on Twenty years of Democracy in South Africa, where he drafted and presented a paper on the South African Constitutional Court’s failure to engage (at times) with its transformative mandate. He also presented on Strategic Litigation in Southern Africa at the International, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA) World Conference in 2016. Most recently, in April 2018, he presented at New York University’s (NYU) Bernstein Institute for Human Rights Conference on, Reimagining Justice: Realizing Human Rights through Legal Empowerment, on the importance of ongoing capacity strengthening of lawyers, paralegals and community engagement and empowerment of human rights activists. His experience also includes advising the Office of the Provincial Police Commissioner in the Cape Town on police actions and human rights.