In 1993, New Zealand's Parliament passed the Human Rights Act, extending legal protection against discrimination to grounds including sexual orientation and disability for the first time. Margaret Bedggood was the chief human rights commissioner who was instrumental in getting that legislation into law. She died on September 8, 2026, at the age of 87, a jurist whose career ran from a Latin classroom in London to the country's peak human rights office and a law school deanship.

A University National Scholarship winner in 1956, Bedggood was born on April 10, 1939, in Takapuna, the only daughter of John Thomas and Caroline Bedggood. She trained first as a classicist, earning a first class honours MA in Latin from the University of Auckland in 1960 and a further MA from University College London in 1964. She spent the 1960s teaching classics in London and joined Amnesty International there in 1968, a membership she maintained for decades. Law came later: at 32, fitting part-time study around her children, she enrolled at the University of Otago and graduated with an LLB in 1978. "I knew the law didn't work for everyone and saw it as an opportunity to do something about it," she said, recalling that decision in an interview for the Thomson Reuters Legal Insight New Zealand legal history project.

At Otago, she lectured in labour law from 1979, rising to senior lecturer in 1986, and spent 1987 and 1988 as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan Law School on a Fulbright award and at St John's College, Oxford. Those postings fed a growing reputation in New Zealand's still-young discrimination law field.

In 1989 she was appointed chief human rights commissioner, a role she held until 1994. She was instrumental in the passage of the Human Rights Act 1993, which broadened the grounds on which discrimination was unlawful in New Zealand to include sexual orientation and disability, according to Thomson Reuters Legal Insight New Zealand. That year she was also appointed a Companion of the Queen's Service Order for public service and awarded the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal.

After leaving the commission, Bedggood became dean of the University of Waikato's School of Law, Te Piringa, from 1994, a post she held until 1999 before staying on as an honorary professor. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2010, and for years afterward she continued to teach a masters paper in international human rights law at the University of Oxford.

Her Amnesty International membership, begun as a young classics tutor in London in 1968, carried through to a seat on the organisation's International Executive Committee from 1999 to 2005 and an earlier term chairing its New Zealand section. Within Amnesty's governing bodies she pushed for the organisation to fold economic, social, and cultural rights into its mandate, extending its brief beyond the political and civil rights it had traditionally focused on. In 2001 she became the founding chairperson of the Human Rights Foundation of New Zealand, a post she held until 2008, steering the young advocacy group's early work on asylum seeker and refugee rights. She was also a co-editor of Law into Action, a 26-author collaboration examining how human rights law functioned in practice.

Bedggood kept making her case in public long after she left office. "Human rights are not just a theoretical construct created by academics with nothing better to do," she wrote in a 2011 New Zealand Herald column. In it, she pointed to the Japanese workers who stayed at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant that year, arguing their voluntary sacrifice was a choice made possible by rights, not proof that rights could be dispensed with. Seven years later, writing again in the Herald with fellow former commissioner Peter Hosking, she argued that "disagreements around commissioner appointments are counterproductive and a more collective approach to appointments is overdue," pressing for reform of how the Commission itself was staffed.

In the 2019 New Year Honours she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to human rights, invested at Government House in Auckland that May.

She married the political scientist Richard Mulgan in 1964, and the couple had three children before separating in 1992. She is survived by her children Nicholas, Timothy, and Lucy, and was farewelled at a funeral at St Matthew-in-the-City in Auckland.

The law Bedggood helped write in 1993 still sets the boundaries of discrimination law in New Zealand more than three decades later. The human rights masters course she taught at Oxford and the students she supervised at Waikato carried forward her habit of testing rights against real cases rather than treating them as abstractions. The Human Rights Foundation she helped found continues the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy she started it on, and the columns she kept writing into her seventies stand as a record of a lawyer who never stopped making the case, in public, for the protections she had spent a career building.