Margaret Bedggood

Margaret Ann Bedggood was a New Zealand jurist, law teacher and human rights advocate who served as the country's third Chief Human Rights Commissioner from 1989 to 1994 and later as dean of law at the University of Waikato. She died on 8 September 2026 at the age of 87.

Born in Takapuna on 10 April 1939, the daughter of John Thomas Bedggood and Caroline Bedggood (nee Slaughter), she took an MA in Latin at the University of Auckland (1960), another MA at University College London (1964), and an LLB at the University of Otago (1978). Time tutoring classics in London in the 1960s, and reading William Temple's Christianity and Social Order, shaped what she later called a desire to be an agent of change. Membership of Amnesty International from 1968 and the practicalities of raising small children helped push her from classics into law in her thirties.

After moving to Dunedin she lectured in labour law at Otago from 1979 to 1989, becoming a senior lecturer in 1986. In 1988 she was invited to apply to lead the Human Rights Commission; she held the chief commissioner's post from 1989 to 1994, a period that included passage of the Human Rights Act 1993. She then spent five years as dean of Waikato's Faculty of Law, tutored international human rights law as a visiting fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and remained an honorary professor at Waikato after retiring in 2003, still supervising students.

Bedggood sat on Amnesty International's international board from 1999 to 2005, served on the Refugee Council of New Zealand, and was a trustee of the Aotearoa New Zealand Peace and Conflicts Studies Centre at Otago. She was appointed a Companion of the Queen's Service Order in 1993, received the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal the same year, an honorary doctorate from Waikato in 2010, and a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to human rights law. A cradle Anglican and member of the Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis, she married political scientist Richard Mulgan in 1964; they had three children and separated in 1992. She leaves a record of teaching, statute reform and quiet institutional advocacy for rights in Aotearoa New Zealand.