Jeremy Brown Shearer

Jeremy Brown Shearer was born in Queenstown on 4 October 1931 and graduated in law from Stellenbosch University in 1953. He joined the foreign ministry in the 1950s, serving in European countries and the United States and representing South Africa at international conferences. ²

In Washington, Shearer was serving as chargé d’affaires ad interim on 18 July 1975 and 27 March 1977, during ambassadorial transitions. He subsequently became South Africa’s permanent representative to the United Nations, presenting his credentials to Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in August 1988. He retired from the foreign service on 30 April 1994. ^{1, 2}

After retirement, Shearer prepared the English version of the foreign ministry’s history for 1927–1993, published in 2005. He then examined South Africa’s confrontations over human rights at the United Nations from 1945 to 1961. Submitted to the University of South Africa in November 2007, his doctoral thesis became the book Against the World in 2011. He assembled correspondence and copies of United Nations documents for this research; the University of the Witwatersrand now holds those papers. ²