All news items
29 April 2013
The Tshwane municipality and the Gauteng Department of Housing and Human Settlements have spent millions of rand of ratepayers’ money on a block of apartments that do not meet building requirements fit for people to live in.
In one of the most glaring examples of how corruption and mismanagement in the city affects people desperate for housing, the municipality and the province paid...
29 April 2013
The Supreme Court of Appeal will on Thursday hear an appeal against a judgment by the Land Claims Court over the Baphiring community in North West, which is seeking to regain title to what it says are its ancestral lands.
This comes at a time when the government has spent R69bn on land reform since 1994, with only about 8% of the targeted land redistributed. The government had initially planned...
26 April 2013
Most asylum seekers arrive in host countries with no evidence to prove they have fled persecution. This means the success of their applications for refugee status depends largely on whether their stories are believed. But the credibility of asylum seekers is increasingly being called into question, particularly in countries that receive large numbers of asylum claims.
Some migrants with no hope...
26 April 2013
Three rights groups are taking two state departments and DRD Gold to court to reveal information about the firm's re-mining operation in Riverlea.
The community was forcibly moved to the area in the 1960s, occupying land around the abandoned mine dump that towers above their houses. On a previous visit, the residents told the Mail & Guardian that the mine had been a minor problem in...
24 April 2013
Lawyers for Human Rights has claimed that the Department of Home Affairs' decision to close the refugee reception offices in metropolitan areas and opening offices in remote areas along South Africa's borders, will effectively create refugee camps.
LHR and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University's refugee rights centre have challenged the closure of the Port Elizabeth RRO.
24 April 2013
One of South Africa’s most expensive land claim cases, involving the world-renowned ecotourism MalaMala Game Reserve, is to be considered by the Constitutional Court.
The current landowners value the land, which covers about 13,000ha, at just over R900m, or R70,000 per hectare.
The Mhlanganisweni community wants an order to return the land to them, and for the rural development and land...
20 April 2013
Judgment has been reserved in the Eastern Cape High Court in a battle between Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the Home Affairs Department.
This concerns a decision by the director general of Home Affairs to close a Refugee Reception Office (RRO) in Port Elizabeth.
LHR has approached the court to have the office reopened after it was closed in October 2011. The lobby group has argued that the...
19 April 2013
It is a windless 35 degrees in the dusty village of Rockville, half an hour north of Pretoria. Yet every door and every window in the village is closed. All the residents are indoors. More astonishingly, there are no children in the street or playing in gardens. The children have been sent away.
"I sent my two children to Johannesburg because they were so sick here," says...
19 April 2013
The Home Affairs Ministry is set to be hauled before the Eastern Cape High Court tomorrow over the closure of the Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office.
"Our argument includes that there was no consultation with the public (when closing the office), there was no attempt to engage with asylum seekers and refugees in Port Elizabeth or organisations representing them,” said head of...
19 April 2013
The Port Elizabeth High Court would on Friday hear an application for review brought by the Somali Association of South Africa Eastern Cape and the Project For Conflict Resolution and Development against the Minister of Home Affairs and three of her officials.
The civil society organizations through Lawyers for Human Rights asked the court to review a decision made by the director general of the...