Mark Heywood is a South African human rights and social justice activist based in Johannesburg. Mark studied English language and literature at Oxford University, and later African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. His political activism started in England and continued in South Africa as a leader of the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC.After the end of Apartheid, Mark joined the AIDS Law Project, starting a lifelong career of civil society activism. Between 1997 and 2010 he was head of the ALP, which was one of South Africa’s most successful human rights organisations. He went onto co-found SECTION27, a public interest law Centre that seeks to influence, develop, and use the law to protect, promote and advance human rights. It was incorporated into the ALP in 2010. Mark was also one of the founders of the Treatment ActionCampaign in 1998, the AIDS and Rights Alliance of Southern Africa, Corruption Watch, and Save SouthAfrica.
Mark has extensive experience of constitutional litigation to realise rights, and has written extensively on HIV, human rights, the law, and politics in both academic and popular media. Mark stepped down as executive director of SECTION27 in May 2019. He now divides his time between his role as the founding co-editor of the Daily Maverick’s new social justice segment - Maverick Citizen -and his research on activism. This includes strategies to ensure the enforceability of socio-economic rights and the alignment of economic policy with state duties to realise these rights.
