All news items
3 February 2015
The South African government’s hardening attitude toward foreigners seeking refuge in the country may be fueling intolerance toward immigrants that exploded into attacks and looting in townships, according to security analysts and human rights lawyers.
At least five people, including a baby, have been killed in violence that began on Jan. 18 in Soweto, in southwestern Johannesburg, when...
30 January 2015
An Indian company this week declared its intention to mine in a critical water catchment area in Mpumalanga, just one year after the area was proclaimed a protected area.
Atha-Africa Ventures called a meeting with landowners in the Mabola protected environment, where the company claims to have a right to mine coal.
Mabola is one of five important water sources in Mpumalanga that were proclaimed...
28 January 2015
The attacks on foreign owned businesses in Johannesburg last week and the refusal of many South Africans to acknowledge the xenophobic impulse behind these attacks – as well as the odious justifications for such attacks – are, sadly, not that surprising. After all, the stench of apartheid-thinking (and the false sense of South African exceptionalism that it reflects) lingers on twenty...
21 January 2015
Mokopane, Limpopo, is a town on the brink. It’s on the brink of complete political meltdown, after years of factional fighting over corruption among municipal leaders. It could also be on the brink of a newfound prosperity, with a major platinum mine being built on its outskirts – on land previously used for small-scale subsistence farming. Some locals say they weren’t consulted...
16 January 2015
Home Affairs staff act as though they’re exempt from the law, court judgments and the constitution, writes Carmel Rickard.Johannesburg - It was a good start to the writing year: a strong, important judgment by a senior judge, expressing his concern about officials of the Department of Home Affairs, who act as though they are above the law.
But the responses from readers over the past week...
13 January 2015
Raesetsa Makgabo was paid 5,250 South African rand (about $450 U.S.) to allow a Canadian mining company to begin drilling on her maize fields.
The two men took the cash from an envelope, counted it carefully and spread it on the table in front of Raesetsa Makgabo in her village home. It was exactly R5,250.
She says she remembers vividly what the men said next: They told her to take the money...
8 January 2015
Court shows home affairs employees that despite what they believe, they’re not above the law, writes Carmel Rickard.
At last, the apparently almighty Department of Home Affairs has been forced to toe the line. Almost 20 years since South Africa’s democratic constitution was adopted, the department’s officials might finally begin to respect – or at least not flout –...
7 January 2015
As scores of refugees living in South Africa continue to be excluded from healthcare services, Lawyers For Human Rights (LHR) says the fight to change this did not end with the death of Badesa Fokora, an Ethiopian refugee who died in November while taking the health minister to court.
Fokora was challenging the constitutionality of the National Health Act’s provision preventing him as a...
6 January 2015
Human rights organisations will not hesitate to haul senior police officers allegedly implicated in the rendition of Zimbabwean political dissidents before the International Criminal Court.
Gauteng Hawks boss Major-General Shadrack Sibiya, and the head of the Hawks team that allegedly handled renditions, Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie "Cowboy" Maluleka , were yesterday served with...
27 December 2014
There's a bullet lodged in Ali Hussein's body, somewhere between his right shoulder and neck. It has been there for nearly two months.
"My arm is dead," he says, showing his completely limp right arm, the result of the gunshot wound.
Hussein owns a spaza shop in Site B, Khayelitsha. His shop was robbed in October, and during the incident he was shot twice in the arm. One bullet...