Description of research: Small-scale fishers depend for their livelihoods on resources that are fast depleting, and it is increasingly being recognised that fisheries managers must take into account the human element of fishing when deciding how best to manage fish stocks, for both ecological and development reasons. The international community has a number of agreements and voluntary codes regulating fishing capacity, illegal fishing and small-scale fisheries, and international trade agreements are also beginning to include provisions on fisheries. However, there is little mention of small-scale fisheries in those trade agreements that have been concluded, and those that are ongoing, such as the World Trade Organization negotiations, are fraught with disagreement and a focus on national interests, to the detriment of fish stocks and small-scale fishers. Kathleen’s research aims to find ways in which small-scale fisheries can be represented appropriately in international trade agreements, taking into account the need for development and poverty reduction, while simultaneously ensuring that sustainability of fish stocks is not compromised.

Description of research: Carina’s research looks at transnational organized crime at sea and explores responses to ivory and heroin trafficking to and from Eastern Africa and the Swahili coast.  Potential responses are considered by drawing from the international counter-piracy response to Somali piracy. Africa is increasingly becoming a major role player in illicit organized criminal activities undertaken to supply demand in other world regions. This is having an increasingly adverse impact on security, governance and development in the implicated regions. To counter this, there needs to be a concerted international effort pooling together resources, expertise and political will of both public and private stakeholders. The highly effective international response to Somali piracy provides valuable insights into such a multi-stakeholder approach a transnational threat at sea. This inter-disciplinary research project explores the subjects of criminality, governance, development, state failure, law and law enforcement and is informed by interviews and participant observation, undertaken in East Africa and elsewhere, in order to compliment the secondary data.

Description of research: Jane’s doctoral research seeks to examine the environmental and other related factors that trigger the increased migration by Fulani nomads from the north to the southern part of Nigeria along with the effects of such migration on the environment and the economy of Nigeria. The research adopts a combination of doctrinal and empirical research. Its aim is to propose ways to reconcile the traditional right to nomadic pastoralism, land ownership rights and the anti-open grazing laws as well as protect the environment in the efforts to regulate nomadic pastoralism in Nigeria.

Description of research: Tinyade’s thesis is exploring the potential of community bylaws as a means of eliminating harmful practices affecting women and girls in Malawi considering that these bylaws are sprouting in rural communities across Malawi, and yet they are not anchored in ‘formal law.’ Using the norm diffusion conceptual framework, the research is seeking to explain the factors that are influencing the use of community bylaws to ensure the protection of the right of women to be free from harmful practices. By understanding how harmful practices are being conceptualised in the community bylaws, the research is going to establish whether or not such understanding is consistent with domestic and international human rights law norms. In this project, the thesis will establish whether or not the community bylaws can be defended as a sincere form of norm internalisation of women’s human rights and will test if the community bylaws phenomenon is revealing other facets of norm internalisation that are at play when the action ground is a rural setting. Furthermore, the thesis is seeking to establish the legal validity of the community bylaws by interrogating the relationship between the bylaws and African customary law within the broader context of legal pluralism.

Description of research:  Omowamiwa’s thesis examines the obligation to fulfill the right to health in low- and Middle-income countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The thesis focuses on States where there is no express constitutional provision for the right to health and there is limited normative clarity on its content. The focus is especially due to these States’ limited capacity to realize the right due to limited resources in the face of competing interests.  Using Nigeria as a case study of States with this phenomenon, he examines specifically, the obligation to fulfill, by providing health care as a key element of the broader right to health. Incorporating human rights research with health systems research, he looks at the six pillars of the health system and how they may be strengthened through the normalization of right to health law even in the face of claims of non-justiciability of socioeconomic rights. The thesis interrogates how normative clarity on the right to health care can help broad based health system strengthening and reform to make the health system better able to fulfill its duties to the populace. He explores how the judiciary may then hold the health system accountable as an agent of the State to its duties bearing in mind the principle of progressive realization and its implications for resource allocation. 

Description of research: Anine's primary areas of research interest are crime statistics and drug policy. Her dissertation investigates South African crime statistics over the last century. It speaks to debates on the causes of crime, especially in South Africa, on the relationship between social theory and empirical data, and on the value of criminological statistics, with a particular focus on the incidence of murder.

Description of research: This research aims to fill the gap in existing literature on Gender and Judging, by providing case studies from an African Perspective.  Using South Africa and Zambia, the research examines the judicial appointment process in regard to women specifically. How does the judicial appointment processes in these two countries enable women to ascend to the bench and are there factors that limit women’s judicial aspirations? Using empirical data and existing literature, the thesis examines the structure and context of the two jurisdictions, the judicial appointment bodies, the role of the judge and how this affects women, the legal profession and other relevant factors.  The research compares relevant literature from other studies in the West and draws out aspects that are common and uncommon in the two jurisdictions. At a practical level, the research aims to provide useful recommendations that would influence policies seeking to improve the representation of women on Superior Court benches.

Description of research: Over the past few years, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in its comments to Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe advised these states to take positive steps to eliminate the practice of lobola as it was a practice that disproportionately affected women by arguing that it should be recognized as a harmful traditional and cultural practice. However, in the same period, the Committee’s comments to other state parties such as South Africa, where the same cultural practice is observed, did not get the same comment. A few questions arise from this lack of standard application of what consists of a harmful traditional cultural practice in one state and not the other? It is from this stand point that the research seeks to investigate the practice on the ground, whether women and men who practice it view it as such and thereby qualifying whether this practice should be called a form of violence against women? If it is, why are we not calling it as such across all cultures? More generally, this research discusses broadly the extent to which the current human rights discourse is influenced by the idea of progress and modernity, by examining whether it is an intrinsically western discourse that has space for the practice of some customs, in this case, lobola.  The research also discusses the extent to which this right to culture can be reconciled with a woman’s right to be free from violence, particularly looking at the practice of lobola.

Contact details: Jameelah.omar@uct.ac.za

Description of research: This research explores whether the criminal procedure mechanisms that target sexual offence complainants are limited to mitigating harm to complainants, that is, mechanisms aimed at preventing secondary victimisation, rather than participatory mechanisms. A fuller understanding of what is meant by participatory rights allows for a proper understanding of whether South Africa’s adversarial system must evolve to accommodate these rights. Because the adversarial system precludes the participation of any third party, the question of complainant participation has not been adequately addressed, with most South African commentators purporting to speak to complainant participation, but actually speaking to protective mechanisms.

Description of research: Technology has developed rapidly over the last three decades.  Over the last decade in particular, information is regularly transmitted and stored electronically – and only electronically.  As a result, Lee Swales’ thesis focuses on the regulation of electronic evidence in South Africa.  It examines hearsay electronic evidence; whether a presumption of regularity exists in South Africa; whether admissibility and weight of electronic evidence is appropriately regulated; and considers the South African Law Reform Commission’s (‘SALRC’) selected option for law reform.  In response to society’s reliance on technology, and evolving communication norms, the SALRC has suggested three different methodologies for law reform in relation to electronic evidence and recommends the most aggressive of these options in the form of a Law of Evidence Bill. In this thesis, Lee agrees with many of the findings made by the SALRC but disagrees with the option recommended for law reform. As suggested by several other stakeholders, rather than a drastic overhaul of the current legal framework, the thesis proposes a more cautious amendment of existing legislation.

Description of research: Paul’s research examines how Prolonged and Arbitrary Arrest and Detention (PAD) has become a justice and human rights challenge for South Sudan. The research builds on existing theoretical knowledge, regional and international legal framework and case law as well as drawing on lessons learned, and best practices drawn from different context and increases awareness on PAD as a specific justice and human rights concern of South Sudan. The research explores how a limitation in the awareness and the application of human rights; the limited geographic coverage and dysfunctional judicial and law enforcement institutions, and; an insufficiency of required logistics for the provision of justice services is perpetuating PAD in South Sudan and rendering it an inevitable consequence of justice service delivery in South Sudan. As South Sudan contends with the challenges of nationhood, this research shall provide a critical understanding of the status of the criminal justice sector in South Sudan and makes recommendations on how the identified challenges and limitations could be addressed in preventing PAD and making the justice system work for all South Sudanese.