Emeritus Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit

Dirk is a Senior Research Scholar and Emeritus Professor of Criminology. Previously, from 1982 until the end of 2005, he was Professor of Criminology and Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1990 to 1995. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Comparative and International Penal law at the University of Nottingham, where he held a chair from 2001 to 2020.

Dirk’s academic qualifications are BA (1970) and LLB (1972) degrees from the University of Stellenbosch and a PhD 1981 from the University of Edinburgh. He was elected UCT Fellow in 1994. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Law from the University of Greifswald in Germany. In 2022 he was A-rated as a researcher by the National Research Foundation in South Africa

Dirk is actively involved in law reform. In South Africa he was the primary consultant for the Correctional Services Act 1998 and a member of the National Council on Correctional Services from 1995 to 2004. He was project leader of the committee of the South African Law Commission investigating sentencing and author of its Report. Since 2003 he has acted as an expert adviser to the Council of Europe on the new European Prison Rules and the European Rules on Juvenile Offenders subject to Sanctions or Measures, and he is currently advising on a new Recommendation on the Promotion of Mental Health and the Management of Persons with Mental Disorders by Prison and Probation Services. For the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime he has drafted Handbooks on Alternatives to Imprisonment, International Transfer of Sentenced Persons and Incorporating the Nelson Mandela Rules into National Prison Legislation: A Model Prison Act and a Commentary. Dirk’s books include Life Imprisonment: a Global Human Rights Analysis (with Catherine Appleton) (Harvard 2019), which in 2020 received the European Society of Criminology Book Award and the Outstanding Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology, and Principles of European Prison Law and Policy: Penology and Human Rights (with Sonja Snacken) (Oxford 2009).