Dr Charles Kalumiya > Kampala Associated Advocates > Kampala, Uganda > Lawyer Profile

Dr Charles Kalumiya

Work Department

Non-Governmental Organisations & Consular Services

Position

Partner

Career

Dr Kalumiya is one of Uganda’s most senior and highly educated advocates. He enrolled as an advocate of the High Court of Uganda in 1971 and has over 45 years experience in the legal, diplomacy, and related fields.

At the firm, Dr. Charles Kallu Kalumiya is the partner in charge of the department of public international & regional law issues. He also supervises the KAA dedicated  team in charge of handling recoveries and the debt collection of delinquent account holders for UMEME. The team has so far collected upwards of UGX.14,000,000,000 (Uganda Shillings Fourteen Billion Only).

His main areas of practice include public international law, international trade, investment law, administrative law and employment law.

He has lectured in law and politics at the universities of Makerere in Uganda, Nairobi in Kenya and Harvard in the USA.

He subsequently worked for the United Nations for 25 years in various senior postings in several parts of the world and  holds the distinction of having negotiated, and then established, the first UN presence in South Africa during its transition period from minority rule under the system of  apartheid to majority rule under full democracy.

Earlier to that engagement, he led the UNCR legal missions to Luanda, Angola & to Windhoek, South West Africa, for the negotiations of the repatriation operation of Namibian exiles and also with their respective countries of asylum pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 435.

As the UNHCR Chief of Mission based in Johannesburg & supervising four field offices, he oversaw the entire repatriation and reintegration process of South African exiles, and in that capacity collaborated closely with South Africa’s future leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and Cyril Ramaphosa. Subsequently, he served as a senior UN representative in West Africa, the Nordic and Baltic States, and Southern Africa. His last major operational engagement was as a regional coordinator & humanitarian envoy for the Angolan repatriation programme (involving seven nations while based in Pretoria, from 2002 to 2003.

He also acted as UNHCR’s in-house general legal counsel for non-refugee legal matters. In that capacity, he was responsible for monitoring the organisation’s procurement contracts as secretary to the contracts committee & for negotiating/concluding UNCR branch office agreements with several states. He also acted for several years as a member of the Geneva-based UN Joint Administrative Appeals Board (JAB) which handles staff disputes with the management under UN Staff Rules.

He was also extensively involved, mainly as legal adviser, in the UNHCR’s major repatriation operations carried out in Western, Southern and Eastern Africa during the 1990s.

Languages

English , Luganda , Runyankore, Kinyarwanda.

Memberships

• Member, Uganda Law Society
• Member, East African Law Society

Education

SJD in Modern  Law of the Sea & Landlocked States, Harvard University.
LLM in International Investment Law, Harvard University
LLM (Hons) in Comparative Law, Cambridge University
Post Graduate Diploma in Law, Law Development Centre
LLB from University of East Africa, Dar es Salaam