Prof Julia Sloth-Nielsen

Julia Sloth-Nielsen is Professor of Law at the University of the Western Cape and the chair of Children’s Rights in the Developing World at the Child Law Department at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

She was a drafter of the South African Children’s Act, and has contributed to child law reform in many southern and eastern African countries (among them, Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, and South Sudan). She has published widely on child and family law issues, including in the areas of customary family law, juvenile justice, child-headed households, and access to justice.

Prof Sloth-Nielsen served as a member of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child between 2011 and 2016. Currently she serves as a member of an international expert group on surrogacy, co-convenes an annual summer school in Leiden on the frontiers of children’s rights, and co-convenes an annual conference on child and family law in Cape Town.

A staff member at UWC since 1994, Prof Sloth-Nielsen has extensive postgraduate supervision experience, with more than 70 students having graduated under her supervision, and has also lectured internationally in Belgium, Switzerland, China, and the United Kingdom.

• (Illicit) transfer by De Gree
•  A foreskin too far? Religious, medical and customary circumcision and the Children's Act 38 of 2005 in the context of HIV/AIDS, pg 69
•  Child justice
•  Children and informal justice systems in Africa
•  Children's rights jurisprudence in South Africa: A 20 year retrospective
•  KOS v Minister of Home Affairs (2017) and its relevance to the law of marriage in South Africa
•  Monitoring and implementation of children’s rights
•  Policy and practice in South African prisons: An update
•  Recent developments in child justice (2016-2018)
•  Southern African perspectives on banning corporal punishment
•  Surrogacy in South Africa in Eastern and Western perspectives on surrogacy
•  The African children’s rights system
•  The rights of minor siblings in migration
•  The role of social workers in South Africa’s child justice system
•  Visions on surrogacy - from North to South
•  Too little? Too late? The implications of the Grootboom case for state responses to child-headed households