CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY AND EVENTS
ARTICLES AND STATEMENTS
PODCASTS
SUBMISSIONS
SPEECHES
EVENTS
ARTICLE: WORLD AIDS DAY – MY HEALTH, MY RIGHT – A WOMAN-CENTRED APPROACH NEEDED
On Friday 1 December 2017, the world celebrates World AIDS Day – the day for global unity to raise awareness on the global fight against this epidemic. The United Nation’s campaign for World AIDS Day 2017 focuses on the right to health and aims to investigate the specific obstacles people face globally in exercising this right. The right to health – as enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and guaranteed in section 27 of the Constitution – is meaningless without ensuring that conditions giving effect to this right are in place, such as adequate sanitation, housing and access to justice. According to the campaign, to end the AIDS epidemic, the right to health and access to quality healthcare must be accessible and available to everyone. An inspiring campaign – but how available and accessible is healthcare for young women in South Africa, who are still falling between the cracks?
ARTICLE: THE CONSEQUENCES OF NEGLECT
The last few weeks and months have witnessed an unrelenting news cycle that has kept most South Africans on edge, anticipating yet another leak, another book containing explosive information, and more indictments against people in high places.
ARTICLE: THE AGE OF NO CONSEQUENCES (AND LYING)
The Life Esidimeni tragedy, in which 143 psychiatric patients lost their lives, often in painful circumstances, subject to inhumane conditions, is replaying before our very eyes. This, as part of the arbitration hearing proceedings are televised on news channels daily. While watching the painful interrogation of former Director of Mental Health in Gauteng, Makgabo Manamela by former Constitutional Court judge Dikgang Moseneke, and hearing her often repeated remark “it was not my fault”, one cannot help but think that we have entered a political age of no consequences.
In his testimony to a parliamentary inquiry on Eskom, the former Chairman of the Board, Zola Tsotsi, made statements under oath that seriously implicated the relevant Minister, Lynne Brown, as being part of the state capture process, resulting in losses or misspent funding of millions of Rands. Minister Brown’s now notorious remark in response to this, that “one of us is lying” falls into the same category of no consequences. And Bathabile Dlamini’s arrogant and cavalier attitude about the Post Office contract with SASSA brings the same to mind: she simply does not take responsibility for her mandated task to ensure that 17 million poor South Africans get their social grants in time.
CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES
- Equality
- Non-racialism
- Gender Rights
- The Constitution
- The Rule of Law
- Multiparty Democracy
- Personal Rights
- Cultural, Religious and Language Rights
- Freedom of Expression and Political Rights
- Social and Economic Rights
- Property Rights
- Education
- Access To The Courts, Information And Fair Adminstration