From 8 - 10 June, 2011, the university of Hong Kong working with Hong Kong LII has hosted the Law via the Internet conference.
Tererai has been attending on behalf of the AfricanLII and today presented our paper: AfricanLII – An Approach to Developing Free Access to Law in Africa.
SwaziLII was also formally accepted as a member of the free access to law movement. Congratulations, Gugu!
The work of the Judicial Institute for Africa (Jifa) and the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) was showcased at this week’s inaugural three-day AGM and conference of the African Network of Judicial Trainers (ANJT), held in Zanzibar. A number of important projects were launched or unveiled at the event, including an inaugural project to draw up a shared ethics manual on judicial training for trainers.
Do your users struggle to connect to the Internet? Pocket Law lets you search for cases and legislation off-line. It is a USB stick loaded with an LII website, which works off-line and updates with new content once users are in Internet coverage.
Kenya is the most recent African state to acknowledge customary tenure as producing lawful property rights, not merely rights of occupation and use on government or public lands. This paper researches this new legal environment. This promises land security for 6 to 10 million Kenyans, most of who are members of pastoral or other poorer rural communities. Analysis is prefaced with substantial background on legal trends continentally, but the focus is on Kenya’s Community Land Act, 2016, as the framework through which customary holdings are to be identified and registered. A main conclusion is that while Kenya’s law is positive and even cutting-edge in respects, legal loopholes place communities at risk of their lands not being as secure as promised ahead of formalization, and at risk of losing some of their most valuable lands during the formalization process. This is mainly due to overlapping claims by the national and local government authorities. Political will to apply the law is also weak. The truism that the law is never enough on its own to secure social change is illustrated. With or without legal protection, the assistance of non-state actors will be needed to help communities secure their lands under formal collective entitlements. The need for judicial interpretation of disputed legal provisions may also be required to ensure new constitutional principles are delivered.
In this post from the website of the International Association of Constitutional Law , blogger Aditendra Singh of the National Law University, Delhi, compares two similar cases from Kenya and Botswana. He poses the question: What made the courts adjudicate the matters so differently?