Discrimination and Access to Justice in Africa

The law can only exert its normative, regulatory and justice-administering functions if there is equal access to the law by all groups of the population. The collection of chapters offered in this volume is a most welcome addition to the growth of the discipline. The book deals with real-life, concrete, and specific types of barriers to such access on the African continent. Most importantly, the analyses are carried out by scholars from the very same area with relevant inside knowledge. These “regional” aspects put the book in a class of works with the same aspects of “regional” orientation as Manual of Romance Forensic Linguistics (Guillen Nieto and Stein; Walter DeGruyter). This is a timely publication from Africa. Professor Dieter A. Stein Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf GERMANY This book is ground-breaking and provides practical research insights needed to ensure African legal systems are linguistically inclusive and non-discriminatory. This book focusses on vulnerable witnesses making it an important contribution to the ongoing research in forensic linguistics. The chapter contributions expose the legal and linguistic inequalities within various legal systems, while offering practical solutions. This is a must-read for forensic and legal linguists, students, legal practitioners and judicial officers interested in language and the law. Zakeera Docrat (PhD) University of the Western Cape SOUTH AFRICA The variety of themes covered by this book demonstrates the extent forensic linguistics is firmly establishing itself as a field of scientific inquiry in multilingual Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a must-read contribution in the field, in its broadest meaning, and the engaged scholars from the various Southern and Eastern African countries have managed to bring to the general readers a clear picture of the challenges posed by language issues in the justice system. Associate Professor Eliseu Mabasso Eduardo Mondlane University MOZAMBIQUE