Urmila Bhoola, former Special Rapporteur (2014-2020)

Urmila Bhoola is a South African lawyer working globally to advance human rights and end child labour, child marriage, forced labour and other contemporary forms of slavery. She was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery from 2014 to 2020.

Ms. Bhoola is the National Director of Lawyers for Human Rights in South Africa and a former Judge of the Labour Court of South Africa. Her judicial appointment followed twenty years of work as a labour and human rights lawyer in South Africa, and she has received many awards for her human rights and gender equality work. She has also been a technical advisor to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on labour rights in the Asia Pacific region and was Chief Legal Drafter of South Africa's Employment Equity Act, designed to redress disadvantages caused by apartheid. She has also served as a part time Member of the Competition Tribunal appointed to regulate compliance with South Africa's Competition Act, and was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of the Witwatersrand. She is former Executive Director of International Women's Rights Action Watch (Asia Pacific), a women's rights advocacy organisation which monitors compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), based in Malaysia.