Archive explainer
Who the Child Justice Alliance were
The Child Justice Alliance was a coalition of non-governmental organisations, community organisations, academics and individuals that campaigned for South Africa to give children in conflict with the law a statute of their own. It was convened from the Children’s Rights Project at the Community Law Centre of the University of the Western Cape — today the Dullah Omar Institute — and it is the reason this domain exists.
The campaign ran for most of a decade. A draft produced by the South African Law Commission was tabled as the Child Justice Bill [B49–2002]; it went through the Portfolio Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development, public hearings in 2002 and again in 2008, a costing dispute and a long delay, and was finally passed as the Child Justice Act 75 of 2008, which came into operation on 1 April 2010. The written and oral submissions from that process, the committee reports, the departmental briefings and the explanatory material published alongside them are all still on this domain, in the archive.
What the coalition argued is still the frame in which child justice is discussed in South Africa: that a child in conflict with the law is a child first; that detention must be a genuine last resort and not a default; that diversion out of the criminal process should be the ordinary route for most offences; and that criminal capacity cannot simply be read off a birth date. Our own coverage of those arguments, written now rather than in 2004, is in Rights & Law.