Legal Articles and Guides

Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba wants the Guptas to answer in court for their alleged racial slurs against black South Africans, says a BusinessLIVE report. Mashaba said he had written an open letter on 11 June to NDPP Shaun Abrahams‚ giving him 60 days to take action against the Guptas after disclosures of their corrupt activities and alleged racist behaviour towards black South Africans.

A Cape Town man who allegedly sought to threaten his estranged wife into acceding to his demands during their divorce has been ordered to permanently remove any pornographic material which she was part of from all his digital devices. A report on the News24 site notes that the couple, who cannot be named to protect the identity of their children, had made sex videos in their home during the course of their marriage.

The Right2Know campaign and Privacy International (PI) have applied to intervene as amici curiae in the matter of amaBhungane challenging the government on the law around spying on citizens, says a News24 report. AmaBhungane filed an application in the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) last year, making a case that Rica (the Regulation of Interception of Communication and Provision of Communication Related Information Act) is unconstitutional.

The Western Cape provincial Standing Committee on Transport and Public Works will tomorrow hold its first public hearings into the National Land Transport Amendment Bill aimed at regulating e-hailing services, which include Uber and Taxify.

The ANC’s planned constitutional amendment will not make ‘one iota of difference’ to fixing the land shambles, according to one of SA’s leading experts on land reform. ‘I am not interested in whether the Constitution changes,’ said Ruth Hall of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. This was because section 25 of the Constitution already gave the government a mandate for transformation, but it had set out to achieve the opposite.

South Africans of Khoisan heritage want a ceremonial handover of all land in the country to their community before the government moves forward with land expropriation without compensation, says a Times Select report. ‘Why is everyone else talking about the land and everyone is silent about the first nation people? When everybody came here, they found our forefathers here,’ said Anthony Williams from the Indigenous First Nation Advocacy SA.

‘Land reform has failed rural people, and it has never been an urban programme. It has failed people because it has not redistributed or restituted land on the scale promised nor has it given rural and urban people with little access to productive resources and insecure tenure what they need from land reform,’ say land researchers Donna Hornby and Lauren Royston.

In an outcome described by the Daily Maverick as a victory for the protection of personal information from corporate recklessness, Vodacom has coughed up R1.2m in an out-of-court settlement for handing over forensic investigator Paul O'Sullivan’s personal information to jailed former underworld boss Radovan Krejcir's legal team in 2014.

The Constitutional Court has been asked to send to jail Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) employees who prevent SA Post Office (Sapo) officials – in one instance threatening them with a firearm – from migrating social grants beneficiaries to the new payment system, says a report in The Star.

Clients of labour brokers become sole employers of contract workers after three months, the Constitutional Court ruled yesterday, delivering a blow to the industry. The court said labour brokers were not dual employers when their clients absorbed contract workers as permanent staff, a ruling which would change the nature of labour broking, says TimesLIVE.

A man who spent more than three years in jail unnecessarily is claiming damages of R34.6m from the state, according to Rapport. Malesela Frans Mosuwe from Polokwane was acquitted on charges of attempted robbery after he had spent 1 185 days behind bars and did community service as part of his parole conditions.

Trevor Manuel, former Finance Minister and one of four investment envoys appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to sell SA to investors, said yesterday that explaining SA’s ongoing land debate had been tougher than expected. ‘Communicating this (issue), I think, is a bigger challenge than what we thought,’ said Manuel, adding that land was a ‘complex’ and ‘unresolved matter’.

The Credit Ombud, Nicky Lala-Mohan, says it seems there is still widespread abuse of the garnishee order system to deduct debt repayments from employees, despite a far-reaching Constitutional Court ruling tightening up the issuing of these orders. In September 2016, the Constitutional Court confirmed a High Court ruling by Judge Siraj Desai that aspects of the enforcement of emolument attachment (EAO) were unconstitutional, notes a report on the IoL site.

The Gun Owners of SA (Gosa) says if the SAP goes ahead with plans to seize 450 000 firearms and nearly 60m rounds of ammunition from civilian gun-owners whose licences have expired, it would be a 'matter of life or death'. Gosa has approached the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria), reports Times Select, noting the urgent application to stop the planned seizures, in terms of the Firearms Control Act (FCA), will be heard on 17 July.

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.