Grahamstown father Mzileni Naki has won what The Herald reports is a landmark legal victory after a judge ruled that a law barring him from registering the birth of his child was unconstitutional. Liesl Muller, of Lawyers for Human Rights, said the judgment was highly significant as it removed clear gender discrimination from Home Affairs regulations. Lawyers for Human Rights have handled 780 similar cases since January last year.

Without a birth certificate, children cannot access social welfare or health benefits, or go to school. Last week, Acting Judge Apla Bodlani, sitting in the Eastern Cape High Court (Grahamstown), declared as unconstitutional a blanket ban on birth registrations by parents whose circumstances do not adhere to the department’s checklist, and has sent the regulations back to Parliament to be fixed.

The ban hit, in particular, families in which one parent was a foreigner, and undocumented parents. In his judgment last week, Bodlani found that parents, regardless of their marital status, should have the right to register the births of their children. He said a part of the regulations barring outright the registration of a child’s birth in certain circumstances was unconstitutional. The rest of the regulations could be fixed by reading it in a way to include fathers. 'There is nothing in the regulations that forbids an unmarried father from registering the birth of his child,' he said.

Full report in The Herald