Child

Acess, an alliance of non-governmental organisations working to protect children’s rights, has launched a Court application in the Pretoria High Court seeking to strike down the Social Assistance Act and its Regulations’ inflexible requirement that children and/or foster parents should submit either 13-digit identity documents or birth certificates when applying for foster care and child support grants.

At the end of 2004 the Strategic Litigation Unit successfully entrenched the principle that government departments could not without due process detain and deport unaccompanied foreign children from South Africa. Pursuant to an application brought by Lawyers for Human Rights, the Pretoria High Court handed down a judgment which held that the legal mechanisms for the protection of South African children, found in the Constitution and the Child Care Act of 1983, apply equally to unaccompanied foreign children present within South Africa’s borders.

In this matter, a pre-primary school, being a private entity, refused admission to a 4 year old pupil on the basis that she was an insulin-dependant diabetic and that the school could not accommodate her treatment routines. After we issued urgent proceedings during September 2006, the matter was settled amicably between the parties after the intervention of Diabetes South Africa was sought.