Professor Luis Franceschi

Prof Luis Gabriel Franceschi, LLB, LL.M, LL.D, is the Assistant Secretary General of the Commonwealth of Nations, an intergovernmental organisation of 56 countries, 2.5 billion people, and one third of the world. He coordinates the Political, Democracy, Electoral, Public Sector Governance, Good Offices, Rule of Law, Judicial Transformation, Human Rights, and Countering Violence and Extremism work in the 56 member countries. He is also the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting Conference Secretary, and, together with the Head of the Host Country Task Force, oversees the organisation and negotiations throughout the meeting. He was the founding Dean of Strathmore University Law School, in Nairobi.

As a thinker, educator and writer, he loves positive and disruptive innovation. He was made a Chevalier by the President of Gabon with the Ordre National du Mérite for his outstanding achievements. He was also the recipient of the 2019 legal excellence CB Madan Award and the 2018 Utumishi Bora National Award. In 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and University of California Berkeley Law School. His area of expertise is innovation in legal education, judicial transformation and comparative constitutional law. He has written widely on the convergence between constitutional law and public international law and been a legal advisor to several national and international government agencies, commissions and programmes, including international and regional courts, the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank.

He sits on several boards and he has also conducted executive leadership courses for CEOs in several countries. He has been a Governing Council Delegate and the Legal Advisor to the President of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme, where he co-drafted the UN Nairobi Declaration. He has published widely on constitutional law, and political and international issues. He was also a weekly columnist with the Daily Nation Newspaper in Kenya for almost 10 years.

Prof Franceschi likes cycling, running and mountain climbing and has reached several peaks, including on Kilimanjaro. He is a Kenyan citizen residing in London, where the Commonwealth Secretariat has its headquarters.