STATEMENT: ADVOCATE GEORGE BIZOS SC
2020-07-31
My wife Elita and I would like to convey our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Adv George Bizos SC.
My wife Elita and I would like to convey our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Adv George Bizos SC.
The FW de Klerk Foundation welcomes the decision of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to institute proceedings against the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in the Equality Court arising from comments posted in the social media on 14 September 2019.
Former President FW de Klerk was recently invited to participate in one of a series of interviews that Jonathan Granoff, the President of the Global Security Institute, has been conducting with the American Bar Association.
In an historic judgement yesterday, the Constitutional Court upheld the appeal of New Nation and others against the judgement last year of the Western Cape High Court regarding the right of individuals to stand as independent candidates in national and provincial elections. The Court declared that “the Electoral Act 73 of 1998 is unconstitutional to the extent that it requires that adult citizens may be elected to the National Assembly and Provincial Legislatures only through their membership of political parties.” It ordered Parliament to remedy this defect within the next 24 months – in time for the next national and provincial elections.
Few people would disagree with the Employment Equity Act’s goals of “eliminating unfair discrimination in employment” and ensuring equitable access to the economy for all South Africans. We need an open, equitable and non-discriminatory economy.
However, in its pursuit of these goals the EEA has now become a core tool in the ANC’s project to reshape society and the economy according to demographic representivity (DR). The ANC’s objective has long been to ensure that DR is achieved in the private sector to the same degree that it is already a reality in the public sector. As Rob Davis put it in 2012 “We need to make sure that in the country’s economy, control, ownership and leadership are reflective of the demographics of the society in the same way that the political space does.”
(b) practicability; and
Now that we are entering Phase III of the COVID19 lockdown process, this may be a good time to take stock.
We live in the strangest of times. The world’s great airports are idle. Hundreds of thousands of hotels have closed. Schools and universities are empty. Millions of restaurants are shut. Everywhere owners of small and medium-size businesses are wracking their brains and scraping the barrel of their resources to keep their doors open. Tens of millions throughout the world have lost their jobs – and tens of millions more are subsisting on greatly reduced wages.
On 17 June the EFF issued a statement to mark the 28th anniversary of the Boipatong massacre. It stated that the massacre had been orchestrated by “an Apartheid government led by FW de Klerk” who had “funded and supported the massacre in order to undermine negotiations…”
I remember Boipatong.
There has recently been some debate regarding when, how and by whom apartheid was dismantled. The “why” of the dismantling of apartheid is more complex: growing international pressure and domestic resistance undoubtedly played a central role. However, other factors included the evolving attitudes of white South Africans; growing acceptance of the injustice of apartheid among white leadership groups; and the irresistible need to adjust policy to accommodate the de facto realities of an increasingly integrated economy and society.