Christof Heyns (MA LLB University of Pretoria; LLM Yale Law School; and PhD University of the Witwatersrand) is Professor of Human Rights Law and Co-director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria. In August 2010 he was appointed as United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

He is a former Director of the Centre for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, as well as former Dean of that faculty. He is a visiting fellow at Oxford and an adjunct professor at American University, Washington DC. He has been a Humboldt Fellow in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fulbright Fellow at Yale Law School.