Programme News
14 July 2013
(News)
Parliament’s plans to allow advocates to deal directly with the public will “obliterate” the advocates profession and be the single most anti-transformative measure “ever to happen in the legal profession”.
This is the opinion of Advocate Ishmael Semenya, the chairperson of the General Council of the Bar, in his general chairman’s report, which was released...
11 July 2013
(News)
Does South Africa currently receive the “highest annual number of asylum applications worldwide”?
It is a claim that in recent weeks has been picked up and repeated, often verbatim, by various media outlets. For example, an SABC television interview with Home Affairs minister Naledi Pandor prior to World Refugee Day on 20 June was prefaced with an introduction stating that...
24 June 2013
(Press release)
The Rohingya, a stateless minority of Myanmar, have endured decades of abuse, persecution and discrimination. One year ago, on 3 June 2012, the massacre of ten Muslims travelling in Rakhine State, following the killing and reported rape of a Buddhist woman, marked the beginning of a series of violent attacks against the Rohingya and other Muslim communities. The violence of June and October 2012...
23 June 2013
(News)
The arms deal commission has strangely retained services of two top Gauteng advocates even though it is not facing any legal action.
Insiders close to the commission, which is probing the R70 billion arms procurement transaction, were taken aback by the retention of Advocate MacCaps Motimele and Advocate Busani Mabunda.
Advocates on a retainer charge between R5 000 and R16 000 a day, depending on...
22 June 2013
(News)
The United Nations Human Rights Council says it is difficult to record numbers of migrant children detained around the world including in South Africa.
“Documentation remains quite problematic because there’s a lot of under documentation of situations. There are countries that have detention, formal detention, that is more or less easy but is the kind of thing that many governments...
21 June 2013
(Press release)
As part of the End Child Detention Campaign and in commemoration of World Refugee Day on 20 June, Lawyers for Human Rights in association with the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa and the African Centre for Migration and Society will on Friday, 21 June, host the screening of the Invisible Picture Show which documents concerns about children in detention centres. The...
21 June 2013
(News)
Refugees living in Nelson Mandela Bay had reason to celebrate and enjoy World Refugee Day yesterday as they received news that the Port Elizabeth High Court had ordered that the Eastern Cape's only Refugee Reception Centre be reopened.
The centre was closed on October 20 2011 when, without prior warning, a notice was placed outside the Sidon Street, North End, office saying services...
20 June 2013
(Press release)
Lawyers for Human Rights on Thursday, 20 June 2013, scored a hard-fought victory in the case challenging the closure of the Port Elizabeth Refugee Reception Office in the Eastern Cape High Court.
The judge has ordered that the reception office be fully functional by 1 October 2013.
LHR and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s Refugee Rights Centre challenged the closure - the...
8 June 2013
(News)
Up to 200 Somalis marched in Cape Town on parliament on Friday morning to deliver a memorandum urging the government to act against the ongoing xenophobia attacks on them around the country. "We need protection - simple as that," one of the organisers, Abdullahi Ali Hassan, told AFP. Amid widespread poverty and unemployment, frustration in South Africa's run-down neighbourhoods...
7 June 2013
(Press release)
The recent attacks against foreign nationals, particularly those operating shops in townships and informal settlements, have sent shivers down the spines of many in South Africa and across the continent. It has been five years since coordinated attacks exploded across the country and led to the deaths of 64 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more. We remember visiting police...