The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Jane Duncan -
On 21 March 1960, the apartheid police opened fire on a crowd of protestors in Sharpeville, killing 69 people. Five decades on, post-apartheid South Africa remembers these events on Human Rights Day. The government has attempted to depoliticise the event, shifting the day from one that is associated with the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to one that South Africans generally commemorate, irrespective of their political persuasions.
Yet the annual commemoration of this day did not stop a...
Jodie Gummow -
1. United States Signs Arms Trade Treaty Despite NRA Opposition
The United States, the world’s number one exporter of weapons, celebrated joining 106 other countries in finally signing the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), AFP reported. The ATT is the first global attempt to regulate the illicit trade in conventional weapons by requiring signatory countries to abide by rules and conditions to control the international transfer and flow of arms.
While human rights groups cheered...
Glenn Ashton -
Namibia, Namaqualand and the Namib Desert are all named after the first people who lived in that area, the Nama. Where are the Nama today? The reality is that they have largely become forgotten bit players in a complex world.
The indigenous people of various nations, descended from traditional hunter-gatherer clans, are broadly referred to as the “first people” or “first nations.” These first nations generally still receive second-class treatment across the world....
In a speech to an international audience, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative presents the reality of the situation in Palestine.
He traces the history of the dispossession of Palestinian land in past decades and more recently the carving up of the West Bank as Jewish settlements expand into Palestinian territories. Barghouti's presentation includes maps that graphically demonstrate the displacement of Palestinians and the shrinking of their...
Saliem Fakir -
The expression, as phrased here, is an attempt to demonstrate the hollowness of human rights and a rights based constitution if all they are can be reduced to normative ideals written on fine paper with no material effect on those that matter. Or as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham once mockingly called it, a mere exercise in “bawling upon paper.”
To phrase it differently: What is the point of political justice when there is no economic justice?
Is it good enough to say...
Dale T. McKinley -
As much as those of us who identify ourselves as social progressives would like to believe otherwise, the reality is that South Africa is a bastion of social conservatism. Indeed, one of the most glaring contradictions of South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘transition’ is that the widely acknowledged (and regularly celebrated) social progressiveness of the Constitution is, in large part, at fundamental odds with the beliefs and views of the majority of South Africans themselves....
