also helped to establish the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He was a board member of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. Minister of Water Affairs In 1990, Asmal returned to South Africa and shortly afterward, he was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee. In 1993, he served as a member of the negotiating team of the ANC at the Multiparty Negotiating Forum. In May 1994, he was elected to the National Assembly, and he joined the Cabinet, as Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry. In 1996, World Wide Fund for Nature-South Africa awarded Asmal their gold medal for his conservation work. During his tenure, he supported the Global Water Partnership of which he was a patron. As Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry he spearheaded the recognition of the concept of "the environment as a prime water user". While serving as Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, he also served as the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (1997–2001). His work as Minister of Water Affairs is widely regarded as successful, which was attributed largely to his ability to work with the still-largely Afrikaner civil service. Minister of Education Although Asmal was not as close to President Thabo Mbeki as he was to President Nelson Mandela, he was promoted to Minister of Education in 1999 after that year's general elections. Among his initiatives as Minister of Education was the launching in 2001 of the South African History Project "to promote and enhance the conditions and status of the learning and teaching of history in the South African schooling system, with the goal of restoring its material position and intellectual purchase in the classroom". Given the vast inequalities in the education system that were inherited from the apartheid regime, the post was seen by many as a poisoned chalice. After rolling back some of the ANC's more ambitious education policies to make his brief more realistic, he managed to introduce some of the most significant and far-reaching changes to the country's education system in its history. One of his most controversial moves as Minister of Education was to threaten South African universities with quotas if they failed to apply affirmative action policies to their students and staff. Asmal decide to close down all Teacher Training Colleges as well as certain Technical Colleges. Outcome-based education was introduced during his tenure, and scrapped a few years