Hi from Cape Town

I have been in Cape Town for about a month and with all of the various crises going on in Southern Africa, work has been extremely interesting. I am working at the Women's Legal Centre, which takes on test cases to challenge discriminatory laws and policies, and also does advocacy to ensure that women know their rights. I have been working on a paper about comparative customary law, with the goal of proposing implementation of a new customary legal system in South Africa (there currently is none). Researching American tribal law was particularly interesting, as I didn’t know much about the system previously. Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Egypt and Zimbabwe are some of the other countries that have separate, but appealable, customary law courts. I have also worked on applications to appeal various cases, and done research into extending the law so that domestic violence is recognized as a form of duress to void contracts, and researched voyeurism and child pornography laws in South Africa, the US and the UK.

The xenophobic crisis tipped at about the same time I arrived in South Africa. There are currently thousands of displaced people around the country who are afraid to return home. Unfortunately, many people have either lost their immigration documents, had them stolen, or can't get access to Home Affairs to receive their refugee status papers. The mayor of Cape Town promised that she was working on the problem 3 weeks ago, but to date it appears no work has been done. The Legal Resources Centre took up the cause, and I recently went to one of the refugee camps in Cape Town along with about 20 other lawyers and law students to gather information to present to Home Affairs. Hopefully our information gathering will force Home Affairs to reissue lost or missing documents, and to issue refugee status for those without it. The camp I went to housed about 300 people, mostly from Zimbabwe, Burundi, Rwanda and Congo. The experiences the refugees have had are disheartening, and hopefully the work we were doing will help Home Affairs get sorted and start dealing with the problem of documentation.

Another interesting development here is that the High Court ruled last week that Chinese are to be reclassified as black in order for the Chinese who were discriminated against during apartheid to benefit from affirmative action laws. While this sounds strange, the reason is that the laws written after apartheid were written with racial classifications, for instance the Black Economic Employment programmes didn’t provide for affirmative action for Chinese, who were classified as coloured under apartheid, but are generally thought of as white today. It has been 14 years since apartheid ended, yet the ongoing effects are still rampant. Hopefully this decision will help to remedy the past effects of discrimination against the Chinese in South Africa.

Other than work, Cape Town has been great. There are about 15 other US law students here working for various human rights organizations, and it is great to be able to see what work each of the organizations are doing. I can’t believe it has been a month already – I know that the rest of my time here will fly by. I look forward to hearing about everyone else’s experiences around the world!