The Secretariat
The Secretariat is entrusted with the implementation of the organisational strategy of the Commission, and is led by the Chief Executive Officer (Acting CEO), Ms Chantal Kisoon. As the head of the executive, the CEO, with the support of approximately 150 staff members, executes the mandate of the Commission. The secretariat has offices in all nine provinces, and a Head Office in Johannesburg.
Chantal Kisoon
Chief Executive Officer (Acting)
Chantal Kisoon is an attorney and former senior researcher of the Constitutional Court of South Africa having participated in the certification of the SA's Constitution.
She obtained sum cum laude post graduate qualifications in International Financial Trade Relations, Environmental Law and European Human Rights Law in Holland. She was a senior lecturer of law and Deputy Director of the Centre of Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. Working through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Centre for Human Rights she was instrumental in bringing together African NGO's and CBO's when South Africa held the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia during 2001 - its first world conference after apartheid. She has written extensively on human rights both nationally and internationally.
Chantal headed the Access to Information programme at the South African Human Rights Commission and thereafter its provincial office in Gauteng. During this time she was part of the African expert working group which drafted the Model Law on Access to Information for Africa adopted by the African Union. Learning the art of managing an organisation grew incrementally through skilled mentors and courses in business management, but started in her youth working for a world famous fast food chicken outlet as a student and thereafter working in the banking sector. She cites her time working with the Constitution, and multiple level of stakeholders in the region as the “gas which feeds her curiosity for learning” and her work at the Commission as “sustenance toward achieving the ideal of universal respect for dignity”.
She obtained sum cum laude post graduate qualifications in International Financial Trade Relations, Environmental Law and European Human Rights Law in Holland. She was a senior lecturer of law and Deputy Director of the Centre of Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. Working through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Centre for Human Rights she was instrumental in bringing together African NGO's and CBO's when South Africa held the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia during 2001 - its first world conference after apartheid. She has written extensively on human rights both nationally and internationally.
Chantal headed the Access to Information programme at the South African Human Rights Commission and thereafter its provincial office in Gauteng. During this time she was part of the African expert working group which drafted the Model Law on Access to Information for Africa adopted by the African Union. Learning the art of managing an organisation grew incrementally through skilled mentors and courses in business management, but started in her youth working for a world famous fast food chicken outlet as a student and thereafter working in the banking sector. She cites her time working with the Constitution, and multiple level of stakeholders in the region as the “gas which feeds her curiosity for learning” and her work at the Commission as “sustenance toward achieving the ideal of universal respect for dignity”.