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Locus standi is a Latin word for standing. Traditionally, it implies that a litigant must have sufficient interest to apply to the court for the enforcement of the right of another person, challenge the actions of the government, have a court declare a law unconstitutional or even to litigate in the interest of the public otherwise the application will not be successful. The interpretation of locus standi before the courts in most common law jurisdictions is liberal. Nigerian courts, however, interpret the principle of locus standi strictly, in the sense that standing is accorded the person who shows cause of action or sufficient interest. This position denies access to justice to many Nigerians who are poor or have no knowledge of their rights as the courts position on standing prevents NGOs or other individuals from applying to the courts on their behalf or litigating in the interest of the public. Presently, the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules 2009 regulate the practice and procedure for the enforcement of human rights before Nigerian courts. The Rules encourage the courts to ‗welcome public interest litigation in the human rights field‘ and not to dismiss or strike out human right cases for want of locus standi. However, it is doubtful if the courts will accept this invitation. This study looks at the context of the interpretation of the principle of locus standi by Nigerian Courts and its effect on access to justice and public interest litigation by NGOs and individuals. It also examines the impact of the provision for locus standi of the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules 2009. Finally, this study provides an analysis of the interpretation of this concept in other common law jurisdictions such as Kenya, India, United Kingdom and South Africa who once interpreted the concept strictly but now interpret it more liberally. This comparison is necessary to show that Nigerian courts are isolated in their position in the interpretation of locus standi and that there is need for the courts to conform to international best practice. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2014 / Centre for Human Rights / LLM / Unrestricted

M.A. / This dissertation examines the use of language and its implications on gender relations within the Swazi courts. Starting from the premise that language use is an important guide in understanding gender differences and differences in power between men and women, this dissertation investigates the language used by the different participants in court proceedings of selected court cases, particularly on offences that involve or otherwise touch on assault. The data is based on proceedings in two selected courts, one in Mbabane (an urban court) and the other in Lobamba (a semi urban court). Analysis is strengthened by an array of theories of gender and cultural studies. The major analytical methodology for this study is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study ultimately locates itself within the line of gender studies on cultural influences, examining how lexical choices in linguistic discourses contribute to sustaining or subverting age-old ideas of manhood versus womanhood in Swaziland. The analysis leads to a conclusion that: (a) Women are viewed as docile and unchanging in terms of their interaction in the society. (b) Within the patriarchal Swazi context, the linguistic expectations of “good women” put them at a disadvantage when communicating with men. (c) Traditionalists have to shift from patriarchal values and integration of the Swazi custom with some of the positive ways in life borrowed from education, Christianity and other modernized institutions. If this is enforced then women would cease to be treated as doormats and marginalised by society. This gender imbalance is revealed in situations of contest. It not only draws on, but also engenders the already existing ideologies of strong and knowledgeable men versus weak and ignorant women, in part by muting the latter. This, in the researcher’s view, is worsened by the fact that such linguistic disempowerment takes place within the structures of the State such as the courts, whose authority can easily be mistaken for that of the men who function within them. Put differently, the connotations of power, authority, coercion and fear within the courts are reinforced when one half of participants are disadvantaged by cultural ideologies such as those of linguistic control.

LL.M. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

LL.M. (International Commercial Law) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Magister Legum / In the aftermath of World War Two, the International Community has shown a renewed commitment towards the protection of human rights. However, whether during wars or under dictatorial regimes, numerous human rights abuses occurred everywhere in the world, from Latin America to Eastern Europe and from Southern Europe to Africa. Countries which experienced oppressive governance or outrageous atrocities has to address the legacies of their past on the return of democratic rule or peace. In other words, they had to emerge from the darkness of dictatorship or civil war in order to establish a democracy. Today, after 14 years of civil war, Liberia is faced with the challenge of achieving a successful transition where the imperatives of truth, justice and reconciliation need to be met. The purpose of this research paper was to make some recommendations on the way the accountability process in Liberia should be shaped as far as prosecution is concerned. / South Africa

Magister Legum - LLM / This research paper will focus on these controversial issues and their significance for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in dealing with the situation in Darfur/Sudan. Furthermore, another related issue that was addressed by the Commission will be analysed, namely which exact degree of mens rea is required for the special intent to destroy one of the protected groups. / South Africa

Magister Legum - LLM / By any standard, victim participation is a relatively new phenomenon in international criminal law proceedings. Incredible advances have been made in the effort to end impunity for crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and, more recently, aggression. As a result, great strides have been made in ensuring the direct participation of victims of grave violations of human rights in court proceedings against their perpetrators. Prior to this, grave violations of human rights committed during conflicts or periods of mass violence were either largely ignored or even if action was taken, victims of the crimes hardly had a ‘say’ in the proceedings. With the advent of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) a new dawn in the proceedings of international criminal law has emerged. The statutes that govern the ICC and ECCC have given a voice to victims in court proceeding buy ensuring victims participation. Despite these advances, scholars have criticized victim participation for being inconsistent in its application at the International Criminal Court. The criticism has come from scholars who have highlighted the unintended consequences of victim participation in court proceedings, arguing that their participation has resulted in the under- or misrepresentation of the actual experience of survivors of war, mass violence, or repression. These problems have arisen largely because the need to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused and to protect their due process rights, to abide by the rules of evidence and procedure, and to conserve judicial resources all cut against victim-witnesses' ability to tell their stories at these tribunals thereby resulting in a limited, and sometimes inaccurate, record of victims' experience. Background: The idea that victims should be allowed to participate in international criminal proceedings stems from a broader movement over the last several decades advocating for restorative, as opposed to merely retributive justice. Proponents of this restorative justice movement maintain that “justice should not only address traditional retributive justice, i.e., punishment of the guilty, but should also provide a measure of restorative justice by, inter alia, allowing victims to participate in the proceedings and by providing compensation to victims for their injuries.” In other words, advocates of this movement believe that criminal justice mechanisms should serve the interests of victims, in addition to punishing wrongdoers, and that the participation of victims in criminal proceedings is an integral part of serving victims' interests. Although the concept of victim participation in criminal proceedings is not easily defined, it has been described as victims “being in control, having a say, being listened to, or being treated with dignity and respect.” Human rights activists supported the concept for several reasons. Many believed, as did victim advocates more generally, that participation in criminal proceedings has a number of potential restorative benefits, including the promotion of victims' “healing and rehabilitation.” Indeed, in its recommendations to the Preparatory Committee on the Establishment of the International Criminal Court (Preparatory Committee I), “participation is significant not only to protecting the rights of the victim at various stages of the proceeding, but also to advancing the process of healing from trauma and degradation.” Some believed that victim participation would bring the court “closer to the persons who have suffered atrocities” and thus increase the likelihood that victims would be satisfied that justice was done. set of recommendations on the ICC elements of crimes and rules of procedure and evidence, noted “the right of victims to participate in the proceedings was included in the Rome Statute to ensure that the process is as respectful and transparent as possible so that justice can be seen to be done . . .” Finally, and significantly for the purpose of this study, human rights activists thought that victim participation might help address the under- or misrepresentation of the experiences of victims. Research questions and objectives of the study: The question this research paper poses is whether victim participation has increased the visibility of the actual lived experience of survivors in the context of war, mass violence, or repression? Under the Rome Statute, victims of the world's most serious crimes were given unprecedented rights to participate in proceedings before the court. Nearly a decade later, a similar scheme was established to allow victims to participate as civil parties in the proceedings before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, created with UN support to prosecute atrocities committed by leaders of the Khmer Rouge during the period of 1975 to 1979. Although there are some significant differences in how the schemes work at the ICC and ECCC, both courts allow victims to participate in criminal proceedings independent of their role as witnesses for either the prosecution or defence. In other words, both have victim participation schemes intended to give victims a voice in the proceedings. Have these new participation schemes before the ICC and ECCC, in fact, helped in satisfying the victims? What impact have they had on the ability of survivors of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide to tell their story and to talk about their experiences in their own words? In particular, has victim participation enabled more of them to tell their stories than would have been possible under the more traditional adversarial model employed by the ad hoc tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Has it allowed them to expand the historical record produced by these tribunals with narratives that would otherwise have been left out because of prosecutorial or judicial decisions not to prosecute violations committed against them? Has it enabled victims to communicate a richer, more nuanced picture of their experiences than they were able to in the context of prior tribunals? The aim is to explore whether these novel victim participation schemes, as implemented by the ICC and ECCC thus far, have actually allowed for greater recognition of victims' voices and experiences than was possible in proceedings before their predecessor tribunals. Have these schemes actually allowed victims to communicate a fuller and more nuanced picture of their experiences than they would have been able to do as victim-witnesses before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)? In other words, can the victim participation schemes at the ICC answer the call for increased visibility of the actual lived experience of survivors of human rights violations in the context of war, mass violence, or repression?.

Phénomène généralement oublié des études de contentieux administratifs, les conflits de traités internationaux n’en constituent pas moins une problématique juridique de taille pour le juge administratif, devant lequel ils semblent destinés à se multiplier. Ces conflits, souvent présentés comme particuliers, du fait de l’inapplicabilité prétendue des méthodes classiques de résolution des conflits de normes, posent au juge administratif un certain nombre de difficultés juridiques relatives tant à leur reconnaissance qu’à leur résolution. A la frontière de deux ordres juridiques, l’ordre juridique interne, par leur lieu de survenance, et l’ordre juridique international, par l’origine internationale des traités, les conflits de traités sont souvent appréhendés avec réticence par le juge administratif, ce qui se traduit par un régime juridique encore difficilement saisissable.La thèse entend offrir une clé de compréhension du traitement jurisprudentiel des conflits de traités par le juge administratif. Plus particulièrement, en s’attachant à distinguer les forces propres au droit interne des forces inhérentes au droit international, dans les solutions rendues, il s’agit de démontrer que les conflits de traités ne constituent pas un problème juridique de droit international, soumis par accident au juge administratif. Ce dernier, acteur de la reconnaissance et de la résolution des conflits de traités, a développé une jurisprudence, en la matière, relevant d’un équilibre complexe et fragile entre les logiques du droit interne et les logiques du droit international public au cœur de la singularité essentielle des conflits de traités devant le juge administratif. / Although conflicts between international treaties are generally a forgotten topic in administrative litigation studies, they constitute a major legal problem for the administrative judge, which are meant to increase. These conflicts, often considered as particular due to the alleged inapplicability of traditional resolving methods for conflicts of norms, raise a number of legal problems for the administrative judge concerning both their recognition and resolution. On the borderline between two legal systems, the internal legal system, owing to its place of occurrence, and an the other hand the international legal system, due to the international origin of treaties, conflicts between treaties are often deal with reluctance by the administrative judge. As a result, this leads to a legal regime still difficult to grasp.This thesis aims at offering a key to understand the treatment by the administrative judge of conflicts of treaties. It demonstrates, through the distinction of the inherent forces/strengths of domestic law on judicial decisions and those of international law, that the conflicts of treaties do not constitute a legal problem of international law, submitted by accident to the administrative judge. The latter, who is an actor in the recognition and resolution of treaty conflicts, has developed a precedent on this subject, resulting in a complex and fragile balance between the logics of domestic and international public law at the core of the essential singularity of the conflicts between treaties before submitted to the administrative judge.

The Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 brought a number of changes in the labour relations environment from its inception on 11 November 1996. The Act codified Industrial Court decisions that were already established under the strike-law jurisprudence from the Labour Relations Act 28 of 1956. These general changes to the law also impact on the strike-law regime. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the contributions made by the Labour Courts1 in developing strike law from the inception of the Act. The Labour Courts have made a number of decisions that have helped in clarifying the provisions of the Act. One should hasten to say that this has never been a smooth process by the courts. It will further be shown in this paper that some of the court decisions were not well accepted in the light of other considerations, such as the Constitution and the previous Industrial Court decisions. On some occasions the Constitutional Court had to intervene in order to clarify the intention of the legislature. For the purpose of effectively dealing with this topic, I shall briefly give the historical context of strike law in the form of common-law position, and the strike-law position before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I shall then endeavour to identify the legislative provision of the Act when it comes to strike-law provisions, at the same time identifying the important court decisions that were made.