Prof. Klaus Beiter is a professor of law at North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. Originally from Namibia, he holds law degrees from the University of South Africa and earned his doctorate in international human rights law from Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany, where he completed his thesis on the right to education under the supervision of Professor Bruno Simma, then a judge at the International Court of Justice.
He is admitted as a Legal Practitioner of the High Court of Namibia. He served for seven years as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, before undertaking a two-year Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, where he conducted research on academic freedom with Professor Terence Karran.
Prof Beiter is the author of the first English-language monograph on the right to education in international law (Brill, 2006), which is now regarded as a standard reference work on the subject. He was recently a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
His research interests include the right to education, the right to science, academic and scientific freedom, intellectual property rights, the extraterritorial application of human rights, and law and development. He serves as an ad hoc consultant to UNESCO, is an academic member of the Consortium for Human Rights Beyond Borders in Heidelberg, an adviser to the Right to Education Initiative in London, an ambassador to the Observatory Magna Charta Universitatum in Bologna, and a member of the Netzwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit (Network for Freedom of Science) in Frankfurt am Main.
He teaches courses in International Human Rights Law, Intellectual Property Law, Socio-Economic Rights, and International Social Justice.