Bereket Habte Selassie

Who is Bereket Habte Selassie?

Bereket Habte Selassie is an Eritrean-born legal scholar and one of the leading academic voices on African law and government of his generation. Educated at the University of Perugia, the University of Hull (LL.B.) and the University of London (Ph.D.), he built an early career inside Imperial Ethiopia's government, serving as Attorney General, an Associate Justice of Ethiopia's Supreme Court, Vice Minister of Interior and Mayor of Harar, before resigning in 1964 out of disagreement with imperial policy. He later left Ethiopia narrowly ahead of arrest to join Eritrean guerrilla fighters battling for independence, eventually serving as the Eritrean People's Liberation Front's representative to the United Nations in New York. After Eritrea achieved independence in 1993, he chaired the Eritrean Constitutional Commission from 1994 to 1997 and was the principal author of the country's constitution, work he documented in his book "The Making of the Eritrean Constitution." He went on to an academic career at Howard University, Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he held the William E. Leuchtenberg Professorship of African Studies, and advised on constitutional reform in countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Iraq.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Bereket Habte Selassie" · Bereket Habte Selassie, "The Making of the Eritrean Constitution: The Dialectic of Process and Substance" (The Red Sea Press, 2003) · Journal of Democracy, author biography page