About Onlineombud’s founder, Neville Melville:
A passionate and involved South African, and Banking Ombudsman from 2000 to 2007, Advocate Neville Melville left practice as an advocate to become involved with alternative dispute resolution in the early 1990s, when he played a role in the National Peace Accord as Police Reporting Officer for the province of Natal.
From this involvement flowed Melville's appointment, as part of former president Nelson Mandela's administration, as Executive Director of the Independent Complaints Directorate (the national ombudsman for complaints against the police).
Melville has a Master's Degree in Law (cum laude) from the University of Natal; one of the subjects being alternative dispute resolution. He attended the Senior Executive Programme at Harvard Business School and the Ombudsman 101 course offered by the Ombudsman Association (now the International Ombudsman Association).
As South Africa's longest serving ombudsman, Melville is a highly sought after international speaker and has mentored various fledgling ombudsmen, including the corporate ombudsman of Edcon and the Banking Ombudsman of Botswana. Melville was a founding member and the first chairperson of the Ombudsman Association of South Africa. He was responsible for developing the Association’s standards of practice.
He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and has a long-standing association with various international ombudsman associations as well as the financial ombudsmen in various Commonwealth countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He participated on the American Bar Association (ABA) panel on international ombudsmen trends that revised the ABA’s ombudsman standards document. |
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