Gerhard van Rooyen has approximately 28 years of law enforcement experience in both national and international system.

In 1996, he was one of the founding staff of the Witness Protection Unit in South Africa. In 2006, he left the South African to further his career in Witness Protection at the International Criminal Court (ICC), when he was appointed as the Protection Officer of the Victims and Witness Unit.   He left the ICC for family reasons in late 2007.  After working in a family business in 2008 and in March 2009, he took up a posting with UNODC as the resident technical advisor to the Attorney-General’s office in Kenya, assisting Kenya to establish and to operationalize a national witness protection program.  This assignment came to an end in May 2011.  For the next couple of years, he worked for the ICC in Kenya, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and from the 1^st of Oct 2012 to June 2014 as the Witness Protection and Transnational Organised Crime Law Enforcement Adviser at UNODC Regional Office for Eastern Africa.  In 2014, he again joined the ICC, this time as the Head of Protection at the VWS (Registry) and current serves as a Senior Manager within the VWS (ICC / Registry / Division of External Operations).

With his roots in Africa, he has extensive experience, designing, implementing and managing law enforcement and witness and victim protection systems in developing countries.

Gerhard is a former student of Technicon RSA and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa where he studied Police Administration and Law and Public Administration Management focusing on policy analysis and development management, respectively.