Honorary Professor, Yash Ghai
UN special representative and Hong Kong University honorary professor Yash Ghai recently made world headlines after Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen described him as “deranged.” Ghai has spent much of his career championing human rights and helped several nations draft their constitutions. Scott Murphy talked to him to find out more.
I was born just outside Nairobi in a small village 66 years ago. My grandparents came from North India. They were part of the waves of migration sponsored by the British Empire. My earliest memories of Kenya are about racial discrimination and hatred. Other than that I had a happy childhood in the family and in the community. We could run around and see absolutely amazing animals. But it was always in this oppressive system.
My Dad was a shopkeeper. It was a typical Indian shop that had everything in it, from kerosene to scotch. Business prospered and he moved and had a different type of business — import, export. That was what Indians did in those days largely because in the Civil Service, if you were Indian, you could not get above a certain level.
My father, by no means a rich person, actually sent me to Oxford to study. My very first white friends were when I went to Oxford. Field hockey was my game in those days.
I flirted with Marxism and am still deeply influenced by Marxist writings.
I did practice law when I took time off from university and worked in east Africa. In the beginning, it’s always interesting and is good money, but I felt cut off from the world of ideas. So I went back to teaching and have done it ever since.
I’ve made at least 15 constitutions. That’s what has sustained me as an academic — helping others. Being able to combine my research with practical work, which has been very enriching, very rewarding. I’ve worked in the South Pacific and assisted in writing or revising five constitutions there: Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and the Cook Islands.
A lot of my work has been on poverty. Poverty, of course, is a denial of rights. The way we define rights today are access to basic necessities of life, freedom of expression. Basically, we talk of human dignity. That is, privacy, non-interference in choices, time to think, time to write, time to reflect. When I look around the world, I find increasing disparities in different countries. And it’s a problem we can solve.