All news items
11 April 2013
TJ Makoene has spent most of his life building his house, investing in it bit by bit.
But everyday Makoene, a resident of Rockville, in the Temba township of Hammanskraal, is forced to live with the stench of sewage in the air, thanks to the sewerage plant less than 50m away from his home.
Makoene owns one of the 80 or so houses across the road from the Temba waste-water treatment plant...
10 April 2013
A sewerage plant supplying the community of Rockville, north of Pretoria, is leaking. But its reconstruction is being contested in court.
The community, through Lawyers for Human Rights, is in court because they say they were not consulted on the project and the plant began working before it had a water licence.
The current water plant was first built in 1983, when the community was still under...
10 April 2013
For the past 30 years, Karl Ammann shot his world-famous wildlife photography on a Nikon. At the weekend, he resorted to covertly snapping a picture with his BlackBerry in order to capture evidence of his detention and deportation from OR Tambo International Airport.
Although the Immigration Act allows for detention of up to 30 days and an additional 90 days with a warrant from the magistrate...
27 March 2013
Lawyers for Human Rights is mourning the loss of former colleague and friend Andries Soja Legoabe who passed away on Sunday, 24 March 2013.
Legoabe was widely considered a warm, welcoming and lively colleague whose passion for equality and human rights was felt by everyone he came into contact with.
Legoabe worked for LHR for over 20 years before eventually retiring and although officially a...
16 March 2013
South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs will not extend the documentation exercise for Zimbabwean nationals living in South Africa, an official in the department has said.
In May 2009 South Africa suspended the deportation of undocumented Zimbabweans and later introduced a special dispensation under which Zimbabwean nationals were given an opportunity to regularise their stay in South...
9 March 2013
It is a matter of grave concern when judges ignore the laws of our country. Unfortunately, despite a significant improvement in South African law relating to evictions — through legislation and Constitutional Court decisions — the courts often fail to extend these protections to poor and vulnerable people.
Millions of South Africans do not have access to adequate housing....
4 March 2013
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) on Friday added its voice in calling for an urgent investigation by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) into the death of Mozambican national Mido Macia — allegedly due to police brutality after being dragged behind a police vehicle and assaulted while in detention.
The taxi driver was found dead...
28 February 2013
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) said on Wednesday its to challenge the Department of Home Affairs’ closing of the Port Elizabeth refugee reception office would appear before the Eastern Cape High Court on Thursday.
LHR teamed up with the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Refugee Rights Centre in representing the Somali Association of South Africa and the Project for Conflict...
19 February 2013
Refugees and asylum seekers receive substantially less protection from the government than they used to when the asylum system was first established in the 1990s. This is claimed by Lawyers for Human Rights and the African Centre for Migration and Society, in a new report published last week.
The report, which monitors trends over the past two years, says South Africa has experienced a de facto...
18 February 2013
Tighter control over immigration — as has been suggested by African National Congress (ANC) policy adopted at the Mangaung conference in December last year — will not solve South Africa’s concerns over jobs and crime, but will make these problems worse, according to refugee rights groups and researchers.
A range of civil society organisations this week made presentations to...