Religion and Socioeconomic Rights among the Youth of South Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaco S. Dreyer ◽  
Garth Aziz
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

South African Legal Culture and its Dis/Empowerment Paradox

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Rights Protection ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Socioeconomic Transformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After

Twenty-five years since becoming a constitutional democracy, South Africa presents the perplexing paradox of arguably having the most progressive constitution in the world, marked by full-throated socioeconomic rights protection, while also being the most unequal country in the world. This chapter makes the argument that this alarming paradox can be at least partly understood in terms of a ‘dis/empowerment paradox’ endemic to South Africa’s legal culture. It takes a historical view of the formation and impact of South African legal culture and the various levels and ways in which the dis/empowerment paradox argued for has been, and continues to be, characteristic thereof. The chapter traces the contributions of the judiciary to shaping the country’s legally pluralistic culture over the course of history and into the present. It ultimately points to judicial complicity in restraining the full realization of freedom and justice under the law—both before and after the dawn of South Africa’s modern-day Constitution—by under-utilizing law’s potential for liberation. Tracing this historical arc is aimed at helping legal, anthropological, and wider readers not familiar with South Africa’s particular circumstances to better understand the concluding argument: namely, that the purported solution to South Africa’s problems described as ‘transformative constitutionalism’ presents notable pitfalls. While the chapter does not argue that the judiciary is solely, or even mainly, responsible for the dis/empowerment paradox of law, it does argue that the judiciary is somewhat complicit in the limited socioeconomic transformation seen subsequent to adoption of the country’s progressive Constitution.

scholarly journals Challenges to Refugees’ Socioeconomic Inclusion: A Lens Through the Experiences of Congolese Refugees in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
Sikanyiso Masuku ◽  
Sharmla Rama
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Interpretive Research ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
2030 Agenda ◽  
Kwazulu Natal ◽  
Migrant Groups

In antithesis to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development (socioeconomic inclusion for all) and a relatively progressive refugee policy framework (Refugee Act 130 of 1998), refugees in South Africa continue to face targeted exclusion and reduced living potentials. Impediments to refugee groups ability to ‘thrive and not just survive’ (as called for in the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees), are examined in this paper through a synopsis of the conditions surrounding their access to legal documents (a conduit to socioeconomic rights), their equitable participation/inclusion within the formal labour markets, financial sectors etc. In examining these issues, a case-study-based interpretive research design technique with eight FGD participants and two life history participants (drawn from Congolese refugees’ residing in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) was done. Several conceptual frameworks as well as a single principal theory (Murphy’s theory of monopolization) were utilized so as to fully examine forced migrant groups socioeconomic participation/inclusion in South Africa. This articles findings revealed that primary cultural, as well as structural agentive processes of obstruction significantly inhibit refugee groups full socioeconomic participating in the life of their host communities. The said obstructions included but were not confined to: adverse forms of incorporation, opportunity hoarding, as well as the normative unobtainability of social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital.

scholarly journals Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights: A Comparison between Transformative Projects in India and South Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha G. Menell
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
International Law ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Article 5

Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 49 : No. 3 , Article 5.Constitutionally enshrined socioeconomic rights are a topic of enduring controversy. Societies overcoming exploitive regimes in the twentieth century have experienced popular demand for rapid economic and social transformation. Even before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emerging constitutional democracies debated the transformative potential of enforceable socioeconomic rights.Opponents of constitutionalizing socioeconomic rights have not disputed the need for transformation in such societies, but argue that such rights are non-justiciable because they present pressing questions of social policy best left to the democratically accountable actors in government. A related objection proposes that judicial enforcement of socioeconomic rights is dangerous to a system of separation of powers.

Nativism in South African municipal indigent policies through a human rights lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Fuo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Local Government ◽  
South African ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
Residence Permit ◽  
South African Society ◽  
Welfare Services ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights

ABSTRACT The dawn of constitutional democracy in South Africa triggered a new wave of immigration into the country. Foreign migrants post-1994 now make up about seven per cent of the country's population. The majority of the new intake are Africans pursuing economic opportunities, or refugees seeking asylum. The convergence of South African citizens and foreigners, especially in the country's major cities, generates competition over space and limited social welfare services which at times degenerates into conflicts with dire consequences. Some South African Ministers and local government leaders have resorted to a nativistic discourse to address competition over limited welfare services and to shield themselves for the failures of the State to achieve the large-scale egalitarian transformation envisaged by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. This article uses local government indigent policies to show how several South African municipalities use citizenship as a mandatory condition for accessing free basic services, and discusses how the institutionalised blanket exclusion of foreigners from accessing these services violates the obligation of non-discrimation which is protected in international and South African human rights law. Against the backdrop of the government's socio-economic rights obligations, this article argues that it is necessary for some municipal indigent policies to be amended to at least cater for the basic needs of indigent foreigners with a permanent residence permit and those with official refugee status in South Africa. It is argued that the blanket exclusion of these categories of destitute non-citizens without consideration of their immigration status fails to distinguish between those who have become part of South African society and have made their homes in the country and those who are in South Africa on a transient basis. Keywords: Nativism, municipal indigent policies, free basic municipal services, socioeconomic rights, foreigners, permanent residents, refugees, South Africa.

South Africa’s Journey from Socialism to Human Rights: The True Confessions of an Errant Socialist

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-323
Author(s):  
Mark Heywood
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Access To Treatment ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Human Rights Practice ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
Democratic Election

Abstract This article explores the possibilities and pitfalls of various methods of human rights advocacy in post-apartheid South Africa. It does so through following the personal journey of the author, first as a socialist in the anti-apartheid movement and later as a leading human rights activist in some of the most successful civil society organizations to emerge in the post-apartheid period. The journey begins in the pre-constitutional period in 1994 (the year South Africa had its first democratic election) and continues through to 2019. It examines the evolution of human rights practice, particularly in relation to access to treatment for HIV/AIDS and the realization of socioeconomic rights to health care services and basic education. It measures its achievements against the discourse of socialists, particularly their critique of using law, the courts and human rights in the quest for equality. It shows how South Africa has a long tradition of human rights activism that stretches back to the colonial and apartheid periods. However, making human rights justiciable in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution was a game-changer that has enabled tangible victories to be achieved through a combination of litigation and social mobilization. Despite this the author believes that this period of advance may now be reaching its limits and he argues that human rights practice now needs a much deeper consideration of its command over matters of economy and private (corporate) power if it is to retain its credibility in twenty-first century struggles for equality and social justice. The article ends with some suggestions about how this can be done.

scholarly journals RETHINKING SOCIO-ECONOMIC RIGHTS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HUMAN AGENCY: REFLECTIONS OF A LAW STUDENT

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vuso Mhlanga
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The South ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
World Bank Report ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
South African Constitution ◽  
Law Student

In this article, I intend to focus on the notion of human agency. I argue that the ideologically laden concept of human agency should constitute an ideological and jurisprudential frame from which socioeconomic rights as enshrined in the Constitution should be construed. I seek to ground my submissions on human agency on theoretical perspectives which challenge the present uneven structures of power in South Africa. This essay draws from a multiplicity of disciplines such as Law, Social Sciences and Development Studies. Such a multipronged disciplinary approach to the notion of human agency furnishes a fresh jurisprudential angle to the manner in which socio-economic rights in the Constitution have been construed. The essay is alive to the March 2018 World Bank Report which sets out in clear detail the inequalities that stifle the agency of the majority of the population in South Africa.11 The essay will reconceptualise the notion of human agency in view of socio-economic rights in the South African Constitution. The philosophical contours which undergird my formulation of the concept of human agency will be discussed. In the end, I will provide some reflections regarding the way forward in an effort to engender agency on many South African citizen.

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