Guest Blogger: Mia Swart

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Mia Swart (left) as today's guest blogger.

Mia's an Assistant Professor of Public International law and Global Justice at Leiden University, the Netherlands, from which she earned her Ph.D. in 2006. Under the supervision of Professor John Dugard and funded by Huygens and Mandela scholarships, she completed a thesis was on the topic of Judicial Lawmaking at the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals.
Mia's based at Leiden's Hague campus, affiliated with its law faculty and Grotius Centre. She also holds the title of Honorary Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was previously worked as Associate Professor. She is also a research associate of the South African Institute of Advanced Constitutional, Public and International Law.

Published in the areas of transitional justice, international criminal law, and comparative constitutional law, Mia currently focuses her research on apartheid reparations. Her guest post below considers lessons learned from South Africa's apartheid era with respect to detention practices.
In 2007 and 2009, Mia received a Humboldt research fellowship to do research at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg and at Berlin's Humboldt University, from which she holds an LL.M. She worked as an intern in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, the same year she was admitted as an attorney.
Mia chooses to honor as her foremother Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), a South African author, feminist, and antiwar campaigner about whom we've posted. Mia writes of Schreiner (below right):

She can be described as one of the most interesting and influential South African intellectuals of her time. She is most famous for her novel The Story of an African Farm, a novel portraying elementary life on the colonial frontier. The novel considered issues such as individualism and the treatment of women. She also wrote Women and Labour in which she argues that women and men should be treated and compensated equally in the workplace. She also argued for the rights of black people and other groups she perecived as being sidelined by British Imperialism. Although she is often described as a feminist and pacifist her true views escape categorisation. She was the deputy president of the Cape Town branch of the Women's Enfranchisement League. She was friends with Emily Hobhouse (a British nurse who protested against the treatment of Afrikaner women and children in British concentration camps during the Boer War) and with British intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

Today Schreiner joins other foremothers -- including Mary Wollstonecraft -- on IntLawGrrls' list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

African lessons on terror detention

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

On 7 March President Barack Obama signed an executive order facilitating the indefinite detention of a group of Guantánamo prisoners. As IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack posted, the order introduces a new system of periodic review of Guantanamo prisoners as well as the resumption of military trials.
Human rights activists view this as a step backwards.
I believe South Africa's Apartheid experience has a special relevance and resonance for the so-called ‘war on terror’.
Much of the current concern regarding the impact of security legislation on human rights centers on the treatment of detainees in places of detention. "The Regulation of Detention in the Age of Terror - Lessons from the Apartheid Experience", an article that my co-author James Fowkes and I published in 2009 in the South African Law Journal, considered the regulation of detention during Apartheid to see what principles or lessons can be gleaned from that experience that can be useful for regulating detention in the context of terrorism.
Following a summary of the most important security legislation during Apartheid, the article examines the nature of the Guidelines and Measures for the Prohibition and Prevention of Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in Africa (Robben Island Guidelines). These Guidelines, drawn up in 2002 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (logo below left), aimed at the punishment and prevention of torture in Africa. It is the aim of the Robben Island Guidelines to assist African countries in designing systems that will be effective in combating torture. It is our contention that the Apartheid experience reveals several respects in which they are not an adequate guide. Whereas the monitoring mechanisms of the Guidelines should be taken seriously, they can be improved upon.
The paper examines the behaviour of the Apartheid judiciary and its performance in providing oversight of the executive’s actions. It then turns to consider the performance of the Apartheid judiciary in two areas key to court regulation of torture:
► The approach to the admissibility of evidence, and
► The weighing of fact in adjudicating torture allegations.
We conclude that even in authoritarian systems threats to national security (whether real or imaginary) seldom fall exclusively within the domain of the executive. It is therefore not naïve to believe that the law can have a positive effect on the way detainees are treated. We offer proposals in the article, as a contribution to the African effort to design systems that will be resilient to practices such as torture in security situations. We believe our proposals have a wider significance and can be a resource upon which lawyers all over the world can draw.