Between coordination and enforcement: What the GBVF disaster declaration actually delivers
Posted: 8 June, 2026 Filed under: Rethabile Mosese | Tags: accountability, ActionSA, criminal justice system, Disaster Management Act, Domestic Violence Act, femicide, GBVF, gender-based violence, legal advocacy organisations, national disaster, National Disaster Management Centre, National Prosecuting Authority, National Shelter Movement of South Africa, political decision, Public Finance Management Act, Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, sexual offences, Sexual Offences Act, Victims of Crime Survey, Women for Change Leave a comment
Author: Rethabile Mosese
Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
A political victory, a legal question
On 21 November 2025, thousands of women lay on the ground for fifteen minutes at the Union Buildings, in shopping centres, on pavements and office floors, honouring the women killed every day in South Africa. I joined them knowing that these numbers are not abstract. Though exact figures fluctuate with reporting cycles, research by the South African Medical Research Council and Gender and Firearms Studies Africa estimates that around fifteen women are murdered daily. Hours after this collective act of mourning, government declared gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster under the Disaster Management Act. For many, the declaration felt like long-awaited recognition. But the legal instrument government chose matters as much as the declaration itself. Having spent over a decade inside the systems meant to protect survivors, I understand how much turns on that choice.
Criminalisation of homelessness and poverty by Zimbabwe’s Vagrancy Act Unconstitutional and against the African Charter
Posted: 2 October, 2024 Filed under: Namatirayi Ngwasha, Zororai Nkomo | Tags: AfCHPR, African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Constitution of Zimbabwe, criminal justice system, Criminalisation, criminalisation of poverty, freedom fighters, homeless, homelessness, human rights, inequality, inhumane and degrading treatment, injustice, poverty, racism, slavery, unjust laws, vagabonds, vagrancy laws, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe’s Vagrancy Act Leave a comment
Author: Zororai Nkomo
Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
In the mid-1960s, Zimbabwe prosecuted a protracted liberation struggle officially dislodging the colonial government of Ian Smith in 1980. One of the liberation struggle’s philosophical underpinnings was to do away with unjust laws and all forms of segregation, inequality, injustice, and freedom of blacks.
Despite all the invaluable efforts by freedom fighters, Zimbabwe is among countries in Africa that are administering an archaic, draconian, and segregative colonial piece of legislation – the administration of vagrancy laws in the criminal justice system- the Vagrancy Act Chapter 10:25.
Kidnappings in Nigeria as a class act: Implications for the criminal justice system
Posted: 18 September, 2017 Filed under: Akinola Akintayo | Tags: abductors, ‘Evans’, Chukwudubem George Onwuamadike, class act, criminal justice system, inequality, kidnapping, Nigeria, personal enrichment, ransom, targeting of the rich 3 Comments
Author: Dr Akinola Akintayo
Lecturer and researcher in the Department of Public Law, Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, Nigeria
Nigeria is a country steeped in inequality. Reports indicate that a minimum of 86 of the 140 or so million Nigerians live in extreme poverty. The country’s richest individuals are also said to earn 8,000 times each day what their poor counterparts spends on basic necessaries in a year. To further underscore the severe level of inequality, studies also indicate that the combined wealth of the top five richest Nigerians can end extreme poverty in the country. That is how bad the income and wealth gap in Nigeria is.
However, this kind of inequality underpinned by exploitative and oppressive capitalist mode of production tends to weaken what some scholars have referred to as the ‘social instinct’ and breeds discontent, opposition and conflicts between society’s classes. In this kind of clime, the less privileged and deprived members of the society may well feel entitled, either within or without the law, to demand what they considered their own fair share of the commonwealth from the more opulent part of the society. The main purpose of this short piece is to interrogate emerging evidence which suggests that recent dimensions of kidnappings in Nigeria is a class act where the deprived class may be demanding what they perceived as their fair share from the more opulent class and examine the omens that this bids for the criminal justice system.
AfricLaw 