Legal Articles and Guides

Lobby group AfriForum has asked the Minister of Co-Operative Governance & Traditional Affairs (Cogta), Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to overturn a directive forcing people who test positive for Covid-19 to be held in government quarantine camps.

An Umhlanga couple – expecting the birth of their biological child by a surrogate mother in Johannesburg this week – was forced to turn to the courts to ease travel restrictions, allowing them to witness their daughter’s birth.

Covid-19 lockdown travel regulations favour the dead rather than the living. The Witness reports this is what emerged yesterday as Howick attorney Amy Findlater was forced to approach the KZN High Court for an urgent order on behalf of a KZN client whose pleas for government and law enforcement to help him get his disabled, ill and at times violent son into the only facility that caters for his special condition and needs – The Open Circle at Alexandra Hospital in Cape Town – failed.

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.

Business group Sakeliga has threatened legal action against the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) unless Minister Ebrahim Patel reverses his recently announced restriction on the sale of warm or cooked foods, notes a News24 report.

With work stopped for millions by the lockdown, the quickest and simplest way to provide wage support to employees in the formal economy would be for SARS to use the tax system to pay employers a portion of workers’ wages automatically.

A judge has given permission for a Cape Town father to drive to Bloemfontein to collect his two children who are in lockdown with their grandparents.

Freed when an out of court settlement was reached, the two Limpopo doctors forced into quarantine by authorities are considering legal action against the provincial health MEC Phophi Ramathuba.

It seems there is still no clarity on the sale of baby goods during the lockdown after an application to the Constitutional Court on the issue was dismissed as not being in the interests of justice.

The prohibition on the sale of cigarettes during the lockdown period has not led to a decrease in public disorder and has made the work of the police even harder.

Government has reiterated that it has amended disaster regulations so that the list of essential goods now includes ‘products for the care of babies and toddlers’ during the coronavirus.

An urgent application has been made to the Constitutional Court for an order declaring it is unconstitutional that baby clothes for newborns have been left off the list of essential goods available to buy under the lockdown, says a Mail & Guardian report.

Stephen Donald Birch is facing criminal charges for disseminating a video in which he claims South Africans risked being infected with Covid-19 by healthcare officials testing people for the virus.

'We should think very carefully about whether criminalising the spread of the coronavirus will help or hurt South Africans as we battle the outbreak,’ says Safura Abdool Karim, a senior researcher and health lawyer at PRICELESS SA, the SA Medical Research Council Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science.

It is laudable that the government has taken drastic steps to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus. However, this must be done in accordance of the law and by respecting all the rights protected in the Bill of Rights. To the extent that the current regulations are not authorised by law, or to the extent that the regulations unfairly discriminate against anyone, the regulations are invalid.