Advisory Board Member: Karam Singh

Karam Singh has spent the past 25 years working in the areas of law reform, human rights and anti corruption.  Most of this time has been in South Africa, where he has worked with leading public and civil society organisations most recently serving as Executive Director for Corruption Watch, the South African chapter of Transparency International.   Karam’s journey as a legal practitioner started after admission as a lawyer in New York in 1999 and work in private practice in New York.  He then joined Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria, South Africa and later joined the Special Investigating Unit, South Africa’s leading anti-corruption agency.

Karam has led various initiatives at the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), in a pre-state capture era, where concerns were growing around systemic corruption. He then joined the South African Human Rights Commission first as Head of Research and then as Provincial Head in the Western Cape. This was followed by a period as Programme Director the Open Society Foundation-SA’s including leading OSF-SA’s access to justice initiatives. He has developed various expertise in areas of anti-corruption, human rights, social juice. He has degrees from Brown University, Georgetown University Laws Centre, the University of Cape Town and University of Pretoria where he achieved his LLM in Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Pretoria in 2014. More recently in 2023, he participated in executive training programme at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University in developing anti-corruption turn around strategies.

 While heading up Corruption Watch, he developed strategy and programmes across a broad anti-corruption agenda including a focus on whistleblower support, promotion of active citizenry, calls for greater accountability and transparency including.   He has been a frequent commentator on South African and some international media on corruption issues. Engagement at this field, has heighted his interest in issues of state capture, kleptocracy and grand corruption.  His formal training has been as an attorney both in the United States and South Africa, and he remains an admitted attorney in the state of New York and in South Africa.

Karam and Kohn were in the same class at UCT Law together, graduating with their LLBs in 2006, and have both remained committed to championing and implementing integrity-enhancing pursuits.