Ariane Nevin

Ariane joined Sonke’s Policy Development and Advocacy Unit in June 2015 as the UCLA – Sonke Health and Human Rights Fellow, after graduating at the top of her LL.M class at UCLA. Prior to UCLA, Ariane completed a BA LLB at UCT, and then joined SECTION27 as the Students for Law and Social Justice Fellow to work on the issues related to the right to education, including the high profile Limpopo textbooks case. While at UCLA, Ariane specialised in public interest law and took a keen interest in race studies, gender and sexuality. She also furthered her passion for working with marginalised and vulnerable groups, particularly incarcerated and former incarcerated people, producing a paper on strategies to address sexual violence in prisons, and developing a report on the experiences of women of colour in LA County Jail. After completing her one-year fellowship at Sonke, Ariane was retained as the national prisons specialist and now leads the policy and advocacy work in Sonke’s national prisons project. As project lead, she works on, a nationally implemented judicial prisons visitation programme, a strong and effective prison oversight body, humane conditions of imprisonment, the empowerment and reintegration of former inmates, and an end to the penalisation of poverty.