Legal Articles and Guides

The lockdown has hit maintenance payments, with normally reliable fathers seemingly being turned into delinquent dads. Many fathers are defaulting on maintenance payments, and with the courts in shutdown mode anxious mothers have little recourse.

The concept of “maternity leave” has been around in our law for a long time, and the journey towards extending the concept to employees other than mothers has been a long one, marked latterly by much delay and confusion over implementation of new legislation addressing the issue.

The Department of Home Affairs has ignored a court order compelling it to issue birth certificates to 24 children who live in towns bordering Lesotho without requiring their parents to pay thousands for DNA tests – allegedly because one parent is not South African.

A same-sex couple will begin treatment at a fertility clinic with a ground-breaking court order in hand that says they will both be mother to a child who has yet to be conceived.

The festivities are over, the bills are coming in and everyone is returning to reality. Couples who for most of the year only have to live with each other after work hours, have suddenly spent a whole lot more 24/7 time in each other’s close company.

The law providing for paid parental leave for parents of new-born children, which took effect on 1 January, has been welcomed by trade union federation Cosatu, notes BusinessLIVE.

The Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) ordered that an unnamed place of safety and the police return twin girls to their parents after they were ‘lost’ in the social care system for four days following their parents arrest.

The fate of three children whose father took them overseas without their mother’s permission will soon be decided by three Western Cape High Court judges, says a Times Select report.

The Justice Ministry’s failure to meet a two-year deadline to change the law to protect women in polygamous marriages has not impressed the Constitutional Court, which had ordered the Ministry to amend the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (RCMA) to ensure the equitable distribution of assets should a spouse in a polygamous marriage die.

Parents who lose their unborn child before 26 weeks of gestation should have the choice to bury the remains and government has no right to place legal barriers in their way.

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.

Judgment was reserved in the Western Cape High Court yesterday in what a News24 report describes as a potential landmark case involving the voices of children being heard in court cases.

Although the actual prevalence per capita of dementia is reportedly on the decline, aging populations ensure that it is becoming more and more of a problem in society – for older people, their families and caregivers.

The Constitutional Court judgment on corporal punishment at home – Freedom of Religion SA v Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development and Others – is a decision that has the country on ‘tenterhooks and in heated conversation’.

More than a dozen attorneys and advocates lined up yesterday in the Eastern Cape High Court (Grahamstown) battle against Home Affairs and national and provincial education departments, in which an NGO and a school seek to give undocumented children in SA free access to basic education.