Gender, Judging and the Courts in Africa

Gender, Judging and the Courts in Africa
Author: J. Jarpa Dawuni
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1000473309

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries. Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights. Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.

Gender and the Judiciary in Africa

Gender and the Judiciary in Africa
Author: Gretchen Bauer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2015-10-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317516486

Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women’s increasing numbers and roles in African executives and legislatures have been addressed in a burgeoning scholarly literature, very little work has focused on women in judiciaries. This book addresses the important issue of the increasing numbers and varied roles of women judges and justices, as judiciaries evolve across the continent. Scholars of law, gender politics and African politics provide overviews of recent developments in gender and the judiciary in nine African countries that represent north, east, southern and west Africa as well as a range of colonial experiences, postcolonial trajectories and legal systems, including mixes of common, civil, customary, or sharia law. In the process, each chapter seeks to address the following questions: What has been the historical experience of the judicial system in a given country, from before colonialism until the present? What is the current court structure and where are the women judges, justices, magistrates and other women located? What are the selection or appointment processes for joining the bench and in what ways may these help or hinder women to gain access to the courts as judges and justices? Once they become judges, do women on the bench promote the rights of women through their judicial powers? What are the challenges and obstacles facing women judges and justices in Africa? Timely and relevant in this era in which governmental accountability and transparency are essential to the consolidation of democracy in Africa and when women are accessing significant leadership positions across the continent, this book considers the substantive and symbolic representation of women’s interests by women judges and the wider implications of their presence for changing institutional norms and advancing the rule of law and human rights.

International Courts and the African Woman Judge

International Courts and the African Woman Judge
Author: Josephine Jarpa Dawuni
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315444429

A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

Gender and Judging

Gender and Judging
Author: Ulrike Schultz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 640
Release: 2013-07-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1782251103

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories. The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice - in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even now, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.

African Women Judges

African Women Judges
Author: J. Jarpa Dawuni
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2025-02-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9783031722745

This edited volume centers the voices of African women judges as agents of justice and equality. The legal and personal narratives approach in the book privileges the contributors’ lived experiences, professional trajectories, contributions and challenges. The legal narrative storytelling approach also contributes to oral histories of African indigenous knowledge production and transfer. By highlighting the substantive representation of women in African judicial leadership, the chapters examine their impact on the development of jurisprudence, judicial administration, and contributions to the rule of law, access to justice, and women's rights in contemporary Africa. This book significantly contributes to the diversity of knowledge and representation in the global discourse on gender and judging, offering a novel contribution to the growing literature on African women judges.

Women Judges

Women Judges
Author: Ulrike Schultz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1040039413

Do women have equal chances in the judiciary? Although women have made their way into law faculties, in many countries of the world they still face drawbacks in judicial careers. This book delves into the different aspects of women at work in the judicial environment, focusing on judicial appointments, promotions, the glass ceiling and representation in high positions of the judiciary across international settings such as Nigeria, South Africa, Philippines, Turkey, Spain, and Northern Ireland. The contributions go beyond the classical career issues by digging into several questions related to women at work in the judicial environment, such as: Are women accepted by their colleagues and by clients at court – male and female? Do they get the recognition they deserve or is there indecent behaviour and discrimination against them? What about work-life balance? And how do women judges perceive their role? The book offers valuable insights by questioning and criticising the status quo, paving the way to a gender equal future in the judiciary. A significant new contribution to international scholarship in the field, this book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession.

Judicial Independence in Africa

Judicial Independence in Africa
Author: Wahab O. Egbewole
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9780854902378

At the theoretical level, most constitutions in Africa normally provide for the concept of separation of powers with each arm of government assigned defined roles and functions. At the operational level, the Judiciary is regarded as the junior partner with the 'restrictions' on funding in terms of spending as it is usually the prerogative of the Executive branch of government to allocate funds to the Judiciary. To what extent is the check and or control of funding affect the operations of the courts? Can in exercise of the doctrine of separation of powers be expanded with regards to the appointment, discipline and removal of judicial officers? What should be the relationship between the two other arms of government and the Judiciary with regards to control of cases to be determined by the courts. All these issues find a way of determining how effective the Judiciary can be in any governmental arrangement and structure. It is particularly challenging in Africa where democracy in practice is still at the embryonic stage especially with regards to the political office holders. The African Union has in place the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights with a provision for an African Commission to determine disputes. How effective is this Commission and how independent is it? This book, Judicial Independence in Africa set out to interrogate some of these issues and was put together by scholars of varied and diverse experience in and outside university environment tracing the evolution of the Judiciary as an arm of government, its relationship with other arms of government and the media, the operations of the institution in relation to issues of human rights, gender and juvenile justice.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783030280987

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

Women Judges in the Muslim World

Women Judges in the Muslim World
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004342206

Women Judges in the Muslim World: A Comparative Study of Discourse and Practice offers a socio-legal account of public debates and judicial practices surrounding the performance of women as judges in eight Muslim-majority countries.