CLIA member’s book released in July 2023

Dr Desmond Oriakhogba, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Private Law, and member of the Centre for Legal Integration in Africa has published a book on The Right to Research in Africa: Exploring the Copyright and Humans Rights Interface (Springer, 2023).

The book probes imbalances in the African copyright system regarding access to information for research and education, which became painfully apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. African libraries and knowledge curators found themselves ill-equipped to perform their role of enabling access to information. As teaching, learning and research are increasingly done on digital platforms, learners and researchers grapple with the challenges of accessing materials owing largely to the protection of these resources under copyright laws.

The book highlights an urgent need to revise the African copyright system from the perspective of human rights law. It asks whether this can be done by establishing a human right to research. In view of the existing broad freedom of expression, and the right to science and culture, education, and property in global, national and regional human rights regimes, it formulates a human right to research in Africa. Its arguments are based on in-depth examination of international and regional human rights instruments, as well as those relevant to the national contexts of African countries.

The book offers a valuable resource for judges, lawyers, researchers, librarians and law practitioners in the fields of copyright and human rights. The link to the book is accessible here.

CLIA researcher wins prestigious grant

Mr Gerald J.T. MandisodzaMr Gerald J.T. Mandisodza, a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Legal Integration in Africa (CLIA) in the Faculty of Law at UWC, has won the 2023-2024 Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Award.

This coveted grant is one of three categories of fellowships awarded annually by the Social Science Research Council of New York (SSRC), with sponsorship from Carnegie Corporation. It supports 6-12 months of dissertation research costs of up to US $15,000 on a topic related to peace, security, and development.

The other categories are a doctoral dissertation proposal fellowship of $3000 to support PhD students working on developing a research proposal, and a doctoral dissertation completion fellowship of up to US $10,000 to support a one-year leave from teaching and administrative responsibilities to complete a dissertation.

All categories of the SSRC fellowships offer two workshops each year to help fellows to strengthen their research, engage key literature in their fields, embark on fieldwork-based research, and develop their capacity for scholarly writing, including academic publications.

The selection process is highly competitive, with each proposal assessed by five external reviewers. Around five hundred applications are received annually from doctoral researchers in African universities, and only about 10% of applicants are selected for awards.

The Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa program was launched in 2011 in response to an acute shortage of highly qualified teachers in higher education in the global South, which is caused by the extraordinary emphasis on increasing undergraduate enrolment without proportionate investment in faculty development. It aims to enhance the ability of African universities to produce the next generation of researchers, faculty, technocrats, and leaders.

Mr Mandisodza’s research empirically examines the role of forum shopping in the construction of customary law institutions and women’s property rights in legal pluralistic contexts. It uses the Vhembe District in Limpopo as a case study. He is supervised by Prof. Anthony Diala.

Earlier in 2023, Mr Mandisodza won a Canon Collins Sol Plaatje Scholarship in support of his doctoral research in the Faculty of Law.

The Centre for Legal Integration in Africa has received a National Research Foundation of South Africa Human and Social Dynamics in Development grant (HSD210501598549) of R1,173,600. The award is to conduct research in Limpopo and Eastern Cape provinces from 2022 to 2024 under a project titled ‘Ascertaining the Foundational Values of Indigenous Laws in South Africa.’

Significance of the project
The project is significant because legal history in the global North shows that colonised peoples adapt towards their imposed laws until both indigenous laws and the imposed laws merge. However, indigenous laws usually disappeared if they were not properly integrated with the imposed laws. Furthermore, customary law has a controversial status in the South African legal system. While traditionalists use cultural relativism to defend indigenous norms, change agents use the primacy of constitutional values to promote law reform. Regrettably, the role of indigenous values in shaping normative behaviour escapes attention in both debates and law reforms. Rather, the jurisprudence of cultural contestations shows that judges usually invalidate cultural practices that they find offensive to human rights. Indeed, law reforms are moulding indigenous norms into universalist images of the rights to dignity, equality, and non-discrimination.

What we will do
Using archival searches, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions, CLIA members and research associates aim to generate empirical data on the core values of indigenous African laws to broaden understandings of normativity in postcolonial settings and guide the reforms of personal laws in South Africa. As part of our capacity building and social outreach, we will train civil society organisations, recent graduates, and postgraduate students on the basics of conducting field research in culturally diverse settings.

Expected outcomes
Our project will contribute to resilience in justice institutions and rural communities by creating awareness about the role played by the foundational values of indigenous laws in people’s observance of cultural practices. By illuminating the role of values in the social settings in which indigenous laws emerged, we will broaden understandings of why and how normative change occurs in South Africa.

Invitation to all prospective postgraduate students who would like to pursue an LLM/MPhil in Transnational Criminal Justice

The South African-German Centre for Transnational Criminal Justice was recently relaunched as a new research institution with 'the potential of becoming the premier teaching and research site in the criminal justice field in the whole of Africa'.