Land and housing unit additional information

Description

The Land and Housing Programme focuses its work on large scale evictions and housing needs.

In the rural areas it focuses on historical land claims in terms of the Restitution of Land Rights Act of 1994. Rural land claims pose a number of peculiar and difficult challenges. Although the right to claim dispossessed land is a constitutional right in terms of Section 25(7), claimants bear particularly heavy and technical burdens of proof.

The claims invariably involve dispossessions that occurred decades ago, sometimes as long as 80 or 90 years. In addition, the dispossessions were almost always of unregistered rights, making proof thereof very difficult. Rural land claims that have been referred to the Land Claims Court need high level legal assistance by experienced land lawyers.

It is this service that the programme provides to communities who have been unable to reclaim their land through the mediation processes of the Land Claims Commission. It is public knowledge that very few of these claims have been settled and literally hundreds such claims are on their way to the court to be adjudicated.