The practice of domestic courts continues to present challenges for understanding the relationship between international law and municipal law. Whereas constitutions increasingly contain more or less similar provisions on international law, the subsequent use of international law by domestic courts varies from traditional doctrinal approaches. This divergence by domestic courts is attributable to the fact that domestic and international courts/tribunals are engaged in exchanging ideas and formulating similar decisions on diverse substantive law issues out of a sense of common judicial identity and enterprise. Due to the multitude of actors and the complexity of the relationships involved, the traditional monism-dualism doctrines do not accurately reflect current practice. Rather, this process is better termed as transnational judicial dialogue. Through transnational judicial dialogue, domestic courts collectively engage in the co-constitutive process of creating and shaping international legal norms and, in turn, ensuring that those norms shape and inform domestic norms. This study analyzes decisions of the superior courts of Kenya and South Africa in order understand the manner in which the courts receive, interpret and re-formulate international legal norms. It is clear that the domestic courts are not mere conduits for the reception of international legal norms into the domestic legal order but that they act as mediators between the international and domestic legal norms. This study also attempts to demonstrate that transnational judicial dialogue may provide normative guidance for the relationship between international law and national law in the domestic legal order. / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Centre for Human Rights / LLD / Unrestricted

Universal suffrage is a guiding principle of democracy. However, it has a long history of being selectively denied. While many of these exclusions have dissipated in twentieth century rights revolutions’, the right to vote is still widely withheld for prisoners. This paper looks at criminal disenfranchisement, its origins, development, and contemporary manifestations. Part I will discuss the history of criminal disenfranchisement to trace its development from a tool of social exclusion to a collateral consequence of criminal conviction. Part II will look at the judicial treatment of contemporary disenfranchisement laws through a selection of representative case studies. Part III will consider how the representative cases form a trend towards criminal enfranchisement, and the implications of this trend for future constitutional challenges in jurisdictions where such laws persist. This paper argues that this trend, while tangible, is tentative and its force may be strengthened through a transnational judicial dialogue.

Universal suffrage is a guiding principle of democracy. However, it has a long history of being selectively denied. While many of these exclusions have dissipated in twentieth century rights revolutions’, the right to vote is still widely withheld for prisoners. This paper looks at criminal disenfranchisement, its origins, development, and contemporary manifestations. Part I will discuss the history of criminal disenfranchisement to trace its development from a tool of social exclusion to a collateral consequence of criminal conviction. Part II will look at the judicial treatment of contemporary disenfranchisement laws through a selection of representative case studies. Part III will consider how the representative cases form a trend towards criminal enfranchisement, and the implications of this trend for future constitutional challenges in jurisdictions where such laws persist. This paper argues that this trend, while tangible, is tentative and its force may be strengthened through a transnational judicial dialogue.