Programme News
5 March 2015
(News)
This week Urban Joburg and CityAfrika hosted an open discussion on the City of Johannesburg’s Operation KeMalao ‘It’s the law’. The by-law enforcement operation triggered by the City’s Public Safety office targets all traders and beggars operating at traffic intersections.
Ke Molao follows on from the department’s previously notorious operation Clean Sweep,...
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...
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...
16 January 2015
(News)
Home Affairs staff act as though they’re exempt from the law, court judgments and the constitution, writes Carmel Rickard.Johannesburg - It was a good start to the writing year: a strong, important judgment by a senior judge, expressing his concern about officials of the Department of Home Affairs, who act as though they are above the law.
But the responses from readers over the past week...
6 January 2015
(News)
Human rights organisations will not hesitate to haul senior police officers allegedly implicated in the rendition of Zimbabwean political dissidents before the International Criminal Court.
Gauteng Hawks boss Major-General Shadrack Sibiya, and the head of the Hawks team that allegedly handled renditions, Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie "Cowboy" Maluleka , were yesterday served with...
27 December 2014
(News)
There's a bullet lodged in Ali Hussein's body, somewhere between his right shoulder and neck. It has been there for nearly two months.
"My arm is dead," he says, showing his completely limp right arm, the result of the gunshot wound.
Hussein owns a spaza shop in Site B, Khayelitsha. His shop was robbed in October, and during the incident he was shot twice in the arm. One bullet...
12 December 2014
(News)
A middleman in the 1999 multi-billion rand arms procurement deal on Thursday told the Seriti Commission of Inquiry he failed to understand why he had been called to testify.
“Why am I here?” Fana Hlongwana asked the commission.
He said he did not understand why there was an issue over the funds, assumed to be millions, he was paid when he acted as a consultant for then defence...
9 December 2014
(Press release)
Civilians in South Sudan have been paying a huge price since the outbreak, on December 15, 2013, of the conflict which opposed the forces loyal to the President Salva Kiir and those supporting the former Vice President Riek Machar. In its mission report on South Sudan, FIDH raises serious concerns over the risks of a further deterioration of the human rights and humanitarian situation in the...
3 December 2014
(Press release)
The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a landmark decision on assessing the credibility of sexual minority asylum seekers. In A, B and C vs. Staatssecretaris van Veiligheiden Justitie, the Court disallowed inappropriate practices in evaluating the claims of asylum applicants claiming persecution based on their sexual orientation. ORAM hopes the Court's ruling will bring about...
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...