The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai (Five-Part Story in The Elephant)

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai

The Elephant

June 2019

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai – Part 1: The Father of the Constitution
June 27, 2019

On an otherwise ordinary Nairobi day in 2016, Yash Pal Ghai stood in a hallway of the Supreme Court of Kenya, waiting to have lunch with his former student and friend, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga. Ghai, carrying his usual striped cloth bag, its worn strap tied in a knot and its edges frayed, waited patiently, his unassuming nature belying his reputation as one of the world’s foremost experts in constitutional law. Click here to read the full text. 

Source: The Elephant

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai – Part 2: Years of Exile

June 27, 2019

Professor Yash Pal Ghai had accepted the offer of a deanship at the University of Nairobi, packed up everything ready to leave Dar es Salaam, and was saying his goodbyes when he got a call from his former student Willy Mutunga. “So Willy said to me, ‘I hope you aren’t coming to Nairobi.’ And I said, ‘I am taking up the deanship at the University of Nairobi.’ He said, ‘I can’t say much now, but don’t come. I can’t talk now, but don’t come until we tell you.’ He was ringing from the AG’s office, where he worked. I didn’t know why they were saying that. But then the University of Nairobi rang me two days later and said they were sorry but my appointment was canceled. I said, ‘You spent hours and hours persuading me, even when you knew how happy I was. I agreed because of your pressure. Why has it been cancelled?’ They said that they couldn’t tell me.” Click here to read the full text. 

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai – Part 3: The Hong Kong Experience

June 27, 2019

In 1989, after 11 years at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, Ghai applied to a new opening at the University of Hong Kong, which was interested in hiring a professor who could work on the island’s impending change of sovereignty. Ghai was interested and felt it would give him a chance to broaden the scope of his work and expertise. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred on the eve of his interview, however, Ghai – appalled at the Chinese government’s violent attacks on pro-democracy protesters – considered backing out. He recalls, “But then everyone said, ‘This is exactly why you must go.’ So I went.” Tiananmen Square reminded him, however, of what he would be faced with as he took on the challenge of analysing and assessing the nature of what would be a new relationship between China and Hong Kong. Click here to read full text. 

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai – Part 4: The Defender of Justice

June 28, 2019

Over the course of his career, Professor Yash Pal Ghai has had the opportunity to act as a visiting professor in a number of countries, teaching law across Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Singapore, South Africa, Canada, Fiji, and Italy. It was during one such visiting appointment in 2000, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that Ghai received one of the most important calls of his career. Click here to the full text. 

The Indomitable Yash Pal Ghai – Part 5: Being Kenyan in Kenya

June 28, 2019

Ghai returned to Kenya in 2008, “with no expectations” of getting involved in constitutional work again. “We wanted to rest,” he says, remembering the decision that he and Cottrell Ghai took to settle in Nairobi. “We felt we were getting old.” Despite what he may have envisioned as a quiet life, however, the Ghais are never far from the limelight. Manji describes the Ghais’ life: “For all their living in Muthaiga in a nice house, all they do is work — and work and work and work.” Click here to read the full text.