Legal Articles and Guides

Electric shocks under running water, dog attacks, forcible restraint, beatings with batons and brutal assaults. In 2014, 20 inmates at Leeuwkop prison in Johannesburg claimed they were the victims of a surge of mass torture at the hands of prison officials and emergency security team members, notes a News24 report.

Landowners are largely responsible for the violence that usually accompanies the unlawful occupation of their land, EFF leader Julius Malema claims in documents filed at the Constitutional Court.

The French arms company Thales, accused of bribing former President Jacob Zuma, has chosen to go to the Constitutional Court to challenge the KZN High Court dismissal of its application for a stay of prosecution because going to the appeal court first ‘would result in considerable, and unnecessary further delays’, notes Legalbrief.

Five American families and the special needs SA children they have legally adopted will finally be able to go home after the Home Affairs Department agreed to issue the necessary documents and passports.

An historic agreement that will see the Khoi and San people receive an estimated R12m annually from the rooibos industry has been hailed as a game-changer, according to a Weekend Argus report.

A group of seven individual claimants will take on King Goodwill Zwelithini and his Ingonyama Trust in the KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) on 22 November to secure the rights to their homesteads. The lawsuit involves the trust’s quest to get residents to sign leases, with rents that increase by 10% a year.

The City of Tshwane has been dragged into a bid initiated by residents to evict hundreds of foreign nationals camping outside the UN High Commission for Refugees in Brooklyn.

Jacques de Vos, who has not been able to practise as a doctor for two years because of a charge brought against him in 2017 over his anti-abortion stance, will know today whether his application to the Health Professions Council (HPCSA) to have the matter dismissed is successful.

Former Springbok lock Hannes Strydom – a member of the team that won the World Cup in 1995 – has been ordered to remove security cameras from his house in Pretoria – because they infringe on his wife’s privacy, says a City Press report.

A group calling themselves the ‘Aboriginal Nation’ got off on the wrong foot with Western Cape High Court Judge Vincent Saldanha when they told him they did not recognise either the Constitution or the court.

'The brouhaha about the alleged ‘‘blasphemous artworks’’ reveals how difficult many South Africans find it to deal with difference and diversity. Instead of asking hard questions about their own position of economic, social and (in the case of religion) political dominance, and privilege and about the harm caused by their demand for special rights, some groups revert to the inappropriate language of rights to assert their dominance – ‘‘rights’’ for us, but no ‘‘rights’’ for those we disagree with.’

Several hundred Soweto residents, led by the Lungelo Lethu Human Rights Foundation (LLHRF), are planning to take Eskom to the Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) to stop the utility carrying out what they say are arbitrary and discriminatory electricity disconnections.

A dispute over whether the children of foreigners born in SA prior to January 2013 and who know no other home than the country should become naturalised citizens when they turn 18 is headed to the Constitutional Court.

An urgent application brought by Ethiopian asylum seeker Alem Bazabe Ereselo, who wanted to force a Johannesburg hospital to give her medical care, has been dismissed.

Security companies should implement zero visibility technology and policies so only senior personnel can gain access to captured personal particulars. This suggestion follows alarms being raised by the Justice Project SA (JPSA) over the sharing of personal information at private estates or gated communities, notes a Weekend Argus report.