Kader Asmal

Abdul Kader Asmal (8 October 1934 – 22 June 2011) was a lawyer in South Africa and Ireland and later a South African politician. He was a Senior Lecturer in Trinity College Dublin and a professor of human rights at the University of the Western Cape, chairman of the council of the University of the North and vice-president of the African Association of International Law. He was married to Louise Parkinson and had two sons.

Asmal was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, received a doctorate Honoris Causa from Queen's University Belfast (1996) and was a laureate of the 2000 Stockholm Water Prize.

Early life Born in 1934, Asmal grew up in Stanger, KwaZulu-Natal. He was the son of an Indian shopkeeper and one of seven children.

Asmal's political development first began in 1952 with the Defiance Campaign, when he was asked to become the secretary of the local rate payers' association. That exposed him to the local Indian community's efforts at dealing with apartheid when the government tried to enforce the Group Areas Act in Stanger.

Asmal was a board member of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria.

Minister of Water Affairs Shortly after returning to South Africa in 1990,

In 1996, World Wide Fund for Nature-South Africa awarded Asmal their gold medal for his conservation work. During his tenure, he supported the Global Water Partnership of which he was a patron. As Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry he spearheaded the recognition of the concept of "the environment as a prime water user". While serving as Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, he also served as the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (1997–2001). His work as Minister of Water Affairs is widely regarded as successful, which was attributed largely to his ability to work with the still-largely Afrikaner civil service. Among his initiatives as Minister of Education was the launching in 2001 of the South African History Project "to promote and enhance the conditions and status of the learning and teaching of history in the South African schooling system, with the goal of restoring its material position and intellectual purchase in the classroom".

Given the vast inequalities in the education system that were inherited from the apartheid regime, the post was seen by many as a poisoned chalice. After rolling back some of the ANC's more ambitious education policies to make his brief more realistic, he managed to introduce some of the most significant and far-reaching changes to the country's education system in its history. One of his most controversial moves as Minister of Education was to threaten South African universities with quotas if they failed to apply affirmative action policies to their students and staff. Asmal decide to close down all Teacher Training Colleges as well as certain Technical Colleges. Outcome-based education was introduced during his tenure, and scrapped a few years later.

Backbencher In 2004, Asmal left government but would remain in Parliament until 2008.

Asmal resigned from parliament in 2008 in protest against the ANC's disbanding of the elite Scorpions anti-crime unit. He felt it was a poor decision and that it was improper that politicians who had been investigated and found by the Scorpions to be engaged in corruption then took part in the vote to disband the organisation.

Later life Asmal called for the controversial Protection of State Information Bill (also known as the "Secrecy Bill") to be scrapped.

He published an autobiography, Politics in my Blood.

He died in 2011 after suffering a heart attack.