Articles

For three decades, Lesotho’s National Assembly has blithely neglected an important duty required by the constitution – to pass a law dealing with ‘conflicts of interest’ by MPs and senators in relation to government contracts. Now though, the country’s constitutional...

Malawi’s struggle with corruption in high places has become even more complicated because of ongoing delays and difficulties in appointing someone to head the country’s Anti-Corruption Bureau. Now the high court has issued an important decision that could have...

The alarming shortage of serving judges in Namibia is emerging as a national crisis. Several events illustrate the scale of the problem. First, a High Court judge made unprecedented remarks on the issue in court. Two days later, the Chief Justice included reference to...

Details of the huge wealth accumulated by former Zimbabwean Cabinet Minister Ignatius Chombo, now public knowledge because of a bitterly contested divorce settlement, have transfixed many people in that country. Now there's been another, unusual, new judgment dealing...

Terrible fires have burnt the Overberg this month. This is the part of the Western Cape where I live and while we've been seeing close up what the fires mean, the resulting dense smoke plumes could even be seen in satellite pictures, drifting 300 km north of the...

Zambia’s highest court has delivered a new decision that ends more than four decades during which government occupied prime private land, land that was never paid for and that the state appeared to think it could hold and use, indefinitely. It's a judgment of major...

Some days I feel like a traitor. After decades of writing about law and legal developments with an almost obsessive determination to find and stick to verifiable facts, I’ve started to write fiction. Historical fiction. The book of short stories I’m working on is...

Uganda’s constitutional court has decided that the country’s divorce laws, requiring strict proof of dastardly sexual behaviour by one of the parties before a judicial divorce will be granted, are quite compatible with the constitution. And, moreover, that the...

A popular action song, widely taught to children in Kenya and elsewhere to help protect them from sexual predation, has played a key role in detecting the rape of a four-year-old by her own father and in the father’s subsequent conviction and sentence. Giving her...

A recent decision by Zimbabwe’s supreme court illustrates, yet again, the problem of ritual killings – murders in the name of witchcraft – and how the courts should deal with them. But this particular case, in addition to being one of the most tragic and gruesome that...