Programme News
7 October 2013
(News)
South Africa would make bigger strides in securing its population register and protecting national security if it focused its attention on preventing statelessness, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) has said.
Stateless people – those who are not recognised as nationals by any country and can often not be deported because of this – form a shadow population of millions of people in South...
7 October 2013
(News)
Herbert Baluku spent six years of his adult life in jail and was released from a South African deportation centre only after two urgent court applications. His only “crime” was not being able to prove citizenship of any country.
His plight is but one example of the tribulations faced by over 12 million people worldwide who are forced to live their lives as stateless persons.
The...
4 October 2013
(News)
As mine polluters get off scot-free, locals wait for the next deadly build-up of acids in the community's drinking water.
In January last year, exceptionally heavy rainfall led to the collapse of the water system in the small Mpumalanga town of Carolina. People fell ill, and the municipality was slow to tell them that they could not drink the water. Water tankers and mosques were the only...
3 October 2013
(News)
Identity theft has once again reared its ugly head after it emerged that terror accused Samantha Lewthwaite fraudulently used a South African travel document when planning the deadly Nairobi Mall attack.
The Department of Home Affairs is due in court next week to oppose a challenge against their decision to cancel all suspected fraudulent identity documents.
Lindiwe, who does not want to give her...
1 October 2013
(News)
Conditions in South African prisons remain poor, with inmates becoming increasingly frustrated with their treatment, the 2012/13 annual report of the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Centres (JICS) has found.
The report was tabled in Parliament last week.
"The inspecting judge [of prisons] characterised 2012 as a year of uprisings by inmates in correctional centres," the report...
27 September 2013
(News)
Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor has vowed to defend in court her decision to invalidate duplicate IDs by the end of October and multiple IDs by December — a decision that is being challenged by Lawyers for Human Rights.
The human rights organisation has brought a court application to declare "unlawful and unconstitutional" efforts to block any citizen’s duplicate...
25 September 2013
(News)
It is a question often dodged by government leaders at press conferences: Why not "ring-fence" a part of the royalties and taxes clawed from mining companies and earmark them to be spent on local communities?
Shrug.
National Treasury's spoils from mining - some R27-billion last year, according to the Chamber of Mines - goes into a general pool and is then thinly spread from Port...
25 September 2013
(News)
Trouble is brewing in Mokopane, Limpopo, where a community is fighting the establishment of what is expected to be the world's biggest platinum mine.
Community members in several villages accuse Canadian mining group Ivanhoe Mines of attempting to shove them aside to make way for its Platreef mine.
Ivanplats, an Ivanhoe subsidiary, is prospecting around the villages of Kgobudi, Magongoa,...
23 September 2013
(News)
Tendai Takawarasha spends his days hawking sunglasses and phone chargers to motorists at traffic lights in an affluent neighborhood of Johannesburg. For him, and many of the estimated 1.5 million mainly undocumented Zimbabwean immigrants in ...
23 September 2013
(News)
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) has warned that government steps to block duplicate identity numbers could lead to a potential nationality crisis.
Attorney Liesl Muller of the rights watchdog’s Statelessness Project said a blocked identity number equated to someone being deprived of nationality and denied access to basic rights while their status was investigated.
Acting Home Affairs...