According to him, he was on “academic rehabilitation”.  ”After four years as dean I started feeling as if I knew very little about anything new in my field. Harvard is a hugely stimulating environment. When I arrived I bought a whole stack of books, mostly written by people who are based there, and for the first three days I did not even get out of my pyjamas. It helped that it was snowing outside. Many of these authors I subsequently met and had the opportunity to talk to and work with. The person who changed my thinking the most about much of what I do is based in the Psychology Department.”

His work as UN Special Rapporteur continued, and he presented a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on protecting journalists, which he prepared in collaboration with researchers at Cambridge, UK. ”The mandate has very strong convening powers, and when we arranged an expert meeting to help conceptualise my October report to the General Assembly on the death penalty at Harvard, the leading experts from around the world attended. I think we managed to say some new things that may help to change the tide - but let’s see in October.”

According to Heyns, one would have to be a zombie not to be impressed by the level at which things are done at the top international institutions. “But I don't think we should underestimate what we are achieving here. It is wonderful to return and see how much the Faculty and UP have grown, even during the last semester. It may perhaps seem effortless from the outside, but that is often the hallmark of good management. TuksLaw is hot, or cool, however you want to put it. In my view Pretoria remains the ideal platform from which one can try, as Steve Jobs has famously said, ‘to make a dent in the universe’.”


(Click here to read more about Prof Heyns' work as UN Special Rapporteur).