Garth Meintjes

Garth Meintjes

Program Manager
Leitner Center for International Law and Justice

Garth Thomas Meintjes is a human rights lawyer, educator, and institution-builder whose career spans transitional justice, public interest law, and justice innovation. He served as Executive Director of PILnet from 2015 to 2021, where he led the organization’s transformation into a global platform connecting civil society with pro bono legal resources across hubs in New York, Budapest, and Hong Kong, and curated a series of international conferences on technology, access to justice, and digital rights. Early in his career, he spent thirteen years as Associate Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame Law School, where he designed and taught courses on human rights practice and accountability for gross violations of human rights, and created first-
of-their-kind clerkship programs at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He holds a Doctor of Laws in International Human Rights Law from Notre Dame, a Bachelor of Law from the University of Cape Town, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Stellenbosch, where — as a young Afrikaner lawyer in apartheid South Africa — he organized nonviolent resistance to military conscription.