Willem Heath
South African judge (1945–2024)
Willem Hendrik Heath (13 January 1945 – 9 October 2024) was a South African lawyer and judge who was the inaugural head of the Special Investigating Unit between 1996 and 2001. He was appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa in 1988 but resigned in 2001 to enter the private sector. Thereafter he founded Heath Executive Consultants, a legal consultancy and forensic investigations firm.
Early life and education
Heath was born in Boksburg on 13 January 1945. He studied law at the University of Pretoria, completing a Bachelor of Arts in 1966 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1968.
Legal and judicial career
Sitting judge: 1988–2001
Heath began his career as a public prosecutor and later entered private practice as an advocate in Pretoria. In 1988, he was appointed as a judge of the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa, but he sat on secondment in the Ciskei Supreme Court, which had its seat in Bhisho in the Ciskei bantustan. His notable judgments included S v Ncanywa, an authoritative opinion on marital rape. He remained on the bench after the end of apartheid in 1994, and between 1995 and 1997 he chaired a major commission of inquiry, the so-called Heath Commission, into corruption and maladministration in the Eastern Cape Province.
When the commission closed, President Nelson Mandela appointed Heath as the inaugural head of the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), a specialized anti-corruption law enforcement unit.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willem Heath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.