The book deals with the controversial relationship between African states, represented by the African Union, and the International Criminal Court. This relationship started promisingly but has been in crisis in recent years. The overarching aim of the book is to analyze and discuss the achievements and shortcomings of interventions in Africa by the International Criminal Court as well as to develop proposals for cooperation between international courts, domestic courts outside Africa and courts within Africa. For this purpose, the book compiles contributions by practitioners of the International Criminal Court and by role players of the judiciary of African countries as well as by academic experts.

Provides a comparison of criminal justice and juvenile justice systems across the world, looking for points of comparison and policy variance that can lead to positive change in the United States. Contributors discuss important issues such as the relationship between political change and juvenile justice, the common labels used to unify juvenile systems in different regions and in different forms of government, the types of juvenile systems that exist and how they differ, and more. Furthermore, they use data on criminal versus juvenile justice in a wide variety of nations to create a new explanation of why separate juvenile and criminal courts are felt to be necessary. --From publisher description.

This book deals with the historic transition to democracy in South Africa and its impact upon crime and punishment. It examines how the problem of crime has emerged as a major issue to be governed in post-apartheid South Africa. Having undergone a dramatic transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from a white minority to black majority government, South Africa provides rich material on the role that political authority, and challenges to it, play in the construction of crime and criminality. As such, the study is about the socio-cultural and political significance of crime and punishment in the context of a change of regime. The work uses the South African case study to examine a question of wider interest, namely the politics of punishment and race in neoliberalizing regimes. It provides interesting and illuminating empirical material to the broader debate on crime control in post-welfare/neoliberalizing/post transition polities.

Martin Chanock's illuminating and definitive perspective on that development examines all areas of the law including criminal law and criminology; the Roman-Dutch law; the State's African law; and land, labour and 'rule of law' questions.

Over the last fifteen years, the South African postapartheid Transitional Amnesty Process – implemented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators from around the world and from almost every discipline of human sciences. Lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists as well as political scientists have tried to understand, describe and comment on the ‘shocking’ South African political decision to give amnesty to all who fully disclosed their politically motivated crimes committed during the apartheid era. Investigating the postapartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the postapartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems. Both processes contain mechanisms that encourage the constitution of the unity of the political body while ensuring future solidity and stability. From this perspective, the book deals with the importance of several concepts such as truth about the past, publicly shared memory, unity of the political body and public confession.

This book provides in-depth, orignal and critical analyses by leading scholars of the penal systems of 16 nations around the world, focusing on changes in social structure, culture and punishment since 1975. Contributors provide an international and comparative context in which to understand the impact of recent profound economic, social and political changes on penal theory and practice.