Programme News
2 December 2014
(News)
In 2010, Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman, was imprisoned in Malawi for getting engaged to a man. Pardoned and freed, she now lives in exile in South Africa. Mark Gevisser reports on an uneasy triumph for the global LGBT rights movement
“Gays Engage!”
This was the headline on the front page of Malawi’s Nation newspaper, on 28 December 2009, beneath a photograph of...
28 November 2014
(News)
Ethiopian refugee Badesa Fokora has died in a Johannesburg hospital after suffering double kidney failure and being refused treatment for it, despite the fact that he had been lying in a hospital bed for a month. Although doctors at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg were aware of his life-threatening condition, they refused him treatment on the basis that he was not a South Africa...
25 November 2014
(News)
Potentially life-saving treatment came too late for a 27-year-old Ethiopian refugee to South Africa, who was due to ask the high court on Tuesday to force health authorities to give him dialysis.
Badesa Fokora died shortly before Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) could fight the system on his behalf.
Fokora had been refused dialysis at the Helen Joseph Hospital – he did not qualify for a...
25 November 2014
(News)
Lawyers For Human Rights says it's outraged at a law that prevented a foreign national who's a refugee in the country, from receiving life-saving medical treatment.
The organisation will have to withdraw it's urgent application on the North Gauteng High Court on Tuesday morning, after their client, 27-year-old Ethiopian refugee, Badesa Fokora, died while waiting for the matter...
25 November 2014
(Press release)
Lawyers for Human Rights has been forced to remove an urgent medical matter from the urgent roll in the North Gauteng High Court after Ethiopian refugee Badesa Fokora passed away before the matter could be heard.
The 27-year-old was taken to Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg after he fell gravely ill a month ago where he was diagnosed with double kidney failure. The hospital confirmed that...
21 November 2014
(Press release)
Lawyers for Human Rights welcomes the Department of Home Affairs’ promise to address the deplorable situation at the Marabastad Refugee Reception Office in Pretoria.
Positive changes are already evident with the appointment of a new security company (after LHR observed multiple human rights abuses such as whippings and beatings committed by the previous Mofoko Security Company). ...
21 November 2014
(Press release)
Twenty-five years ago the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted, and with it the world made a promise to children: to uphold their fundamental rights, to promote their human dignity, and to safeguard their best interests in all actions. Today, the CRC remains the most widely and rapidly ratified international human rights treaty in history. Only two countries, Somalia and the...
19 November 2014
(News)
On a cloudy Monday afternoon, an imposing group of watchful, youthful men and women in bright yellow bibs religiously congregate along Thabo Sehume street in central Pretoria. They do so almost every day, in different streets.
Their work is partly inscribed on their bright yellow bibs - Pretoria central community policing forum (CPF). Some in the group are wearing police issue black boots, some...
13 November 2014
(News)
The task team established by Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba to investigate the implementation of the new visa regulations was aware of the report on job losses commissioned by the Tourism Business Council of SA, the council said on Monday.
The report conducted by auditors Grant Thornton and leaked to The Times newspaper this week warned that more than 100,000 jobs in the tourism industry...
13 November 2014
(News)
On 4th November the UN launched a global campaign to end statelessness within ten years. I confidently predict that the result of this campaign will be to ‘increase’ statelessness by many millions of people. This is not because I think that the campaign is misconceived — far from it — but because the statistics on the numbers of stateless persons are currently so...