Programme News
13 February 2015
(Press release)
Lawyers for Human Rights has launched the Promoting Citizenship and Preventing Statelessness in South Africa: A Practitioner’s Guide that will assist practitioners in dealing with the growing phenomenon of statelessness in South Africa.
A stateless person is someone who is not recognised as a citizen by any state under the operation of its laws.
LHR began the Statelessness Project in 2011...
12 February 2015
(News)
Police in unmarked cars are going to "clean up" Johannesburg, evicting beggars, traders and pamphlet distributors from traffic intersections throughout the metro.
And in the near future motorists giving money to beggars or hawkers at intersections could fall foul of the law and be fined.
Johannesburg yesterday launched Operation Ke Molao(It is the law), which involves uniformed metro...
5 February 2015
(News)
LHR's Kayan Leung addressed the issue of xenophobic violence across South Africa on the Voice of Wits' programme Law Focus.
The show is aired across four community radio stations including in Alexandra (Gauteng), Phalaborwa (Limpopo), Alfred Nzo Community Radio (Eastern Cape) and Radio Riverside (Northern Cape).
To hear Kayan Leung's interview listen here:
5 February 2015
(News)
Liesl Heila Muller
Attorney, Head of the Statelessness Project, Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme
What does Lawyers for Human Rights’ work on statelessness look like?
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) is an implementing partner to the UNHCR for statelessness. We focus on advocacy for the protection of stateless persons and solutions to statelessness in South Africa, including...
3 February 2015
(News)
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...
28 January 2015
(News)
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...
24 January 2015
(Press release)
The xenophobic violence spreading throughout Soweto and surrounding areas in Johannesburg is indicative of a lack of tolerance and compassion for foreign nationals trying to make a living in South Africa.
Lawyers for Human Rights is shocked and disappointed by the blatant disregard for human life in these attacks and calls for a swift and efficient end to the violence.
So far, at least three...
7 January 2015
(News)
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...
12 December 2014
(News)
Refugee advocates in South Africa have reacted with dismay and scepticism to a planned revamp of the asylum application process which the government says is designed to distinguish economic migrants from people with a bona fide case for refugee status.
"The granting of asylum should not be contingent on an applicant's skills, economic circumstances, employment history or number of...
Keynote address by Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu General Secretary, to the World Social Forum on Migration
8 December 2014
(News)
It is especially appropriate that this very important discussion in migration is happening here in Africa, and on a very special date, a year to the day since we lost our great liberator and leader, Comrade Nelson Mandela. There could be no finer role model for this gathering to follow. He, better than anyone, showed us how to resolve difficult and complex challenges, bringing people together,...