Retirement of Professor JH van Rooyen

• Date: 28 August 2019
• Published date: 28 August 2019

Retirement of

Professor JH van Rooyen

It

was with much regret that the editorial board of the

South African Journal of

Criminal Justice

received a notification from Professor Jannie van Rooyen that

he wished to retire as an editor of the

Journal.

Professor van Rooyen's association with this journal has a long history. The

journal is the successor to the

South African Journal of Criminal Law &

Criminology/ Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Strafreg & Kriminologie (SACC)

which first appeared in 1977. That journal was, in turn, the successor to

Crime,

Punishment and Correction/Misdaad, Straf en Hervorming

published in 1972

under the auspices of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and

Rehabilitation of Offenders, (NICRO), edited by Professor Roland Graser.

Van Rooyen, then a senior lecturer in the Department of Criminal and

Procedural Law at the University of South Africa, was involved in the

organization of the important conference 'Crime, Law and the Community'

held at the University of Cape Town on 1-4 April 1975. After the conference,

an Institute of Criminology was established at the University of Cape Town in

1976, and Van Rooyen was appointed as its first Director. The first issue of

SACC

appeared in the following year with Jannie van Rooyen, together with

Roland Graser, as a co-editor. Jannie continued as an editor of the journal until

1987 when, through a change of publishers, the journal was relaunched under

the new title of

South African Journal of CriminalJustice.

The panel of editors

was increased, and happily Professor van Rooyen agreed to continue as an

editor of the once more transformed journal.

As will be seen from this brief history, Jannie van Rooyen has been actively

involved for the last two decades as an editor of the only South African law

journal exclusively devoted to criminal justice. During the era of the

South

African Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology/Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir

Strafreg & Kriminologie,

Van Rooyen (and his co-editors) consciously raised

the profile of criminological studies in South Africa, regarding it as one of the

functions of the journal to bridge the gap between criminal law and

criminology (see, for instance, the editorial in (1979) 3

SACC

1). Throughout

these decades, as the apartheid system imposed greater and increasingly

intolerable burdens on the South Africa criminal justice system,

SACC

protested these developments in one way and another, calling for reform of

bad laws and decriminalization of bad crimes (see the editorial under Van

Rooyen's hand in (1986) 10

SACC 1).

1

(1997) 10 SACJ 1

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