In the media
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24 January 2015
Mail & Guardian
The unrest that flared up in Soweto and other areas this week showed a lack of compassion for foreign nationals trying to make a living in South Africa, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) said on Saturday.
“The LHR is shocked and disappointed by the blatant disregard for human life in these attacks and calls for a swift and efficient end to the violence,” said LHR attorney Patricia Erasmus in a statement.
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24 January 2015
South African Press Association
The unrest that flared up in Soweto and other areas this week showed a lack of compassion for foreign nationals trying to make a living in South Africa, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) said on Saturday.
“The LHR is shocked and disappointed by the blatant disregard for human life in these attacks and calls for a swift and efficient end to the violence,” said LHR attorney Patricia Erasmus in a statement.
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22 January 2015
SABC
The spate of looting of foreign nationals' shops in parts of Soweto has thrown open the issue of xenophobia once again. To discuss the impact of xenophobia on the integration of migrants in South Africa, SABC interviewed Patricia Erasmus from the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights.
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21 January 2015
Daily Maverick
Mokopane, Limpopo, is a town on the brink. It’s on the brink of complete political meltdown, after years of factional fighting over corruption among municipal leaders. It could also be on the brink of a newfound prosperity, with a major platinum mine being built on its outskirts – on land previously used for small-scale subsistence farming. Some locals say they weren’t consulted properly, while mine bosses insist they must get on board or be left behind. The tensions here are emblematic of much wider social and political fraying-points.
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16 January 2015
The Star
Home Affairs staff act as though they’re exempt from the law, court judgments and the constitution, writes Carmel Rickard.
Johannesburg - It was a good start to the writing year: a strong, important judgment by a senior judge, expressing his concern about officials of the Department of Home Affairs, who act as though they are above the law.
But the responses from readers over the past week has taken me by surprise.
A few were angry with the people who took up the case – and with my report of the judgment as good news.
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10 January 2015
Globe and Mail
Raesetsa Makgabo was paid R5,250 to allow a Canadian mining company to begin drilling on her maize fields.
The two men took the cash from an envelope, counted it carefully and spread it on the table in front of Raesetsa Makgabo in her village home. It was exactly R5,250.
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8 January 2015
Cape Times
Court shows home affairs employees that despite what they believe, they’re not above the law, writes Carmel Rickard.
At last, the apparently almighty Department of Home Affairs has been forced to toe the line. Almost 20 years since South Africa’s democratic constitution was adopted, the department’s officials might finally begin to respect – or at least not flout – our supreme law.
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7 January 2015
The New Age
As scores of refugees living in South Africa continue to be excluded from healthcare services, Lawyers For Human Rights (LHR) says the fight to change this did not end with the death of Badesa Fokora, an Ethiopian refugee who died in November while taking the health minister to court.
Fokora was challenging the constitutionality of the National Health Act’s provision preventing him as a refugee from being placed in the chronic renal treatment programme in a public hospital. The case had to be struck off the roll after he died of renal complications.
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7 January 2015
TimesLive
Human rights organisations will not hesitate to haul senior police officers allegedly implicated in the rendition of Zimbabwean political dissidents before the International Criminal Court.
Gauteng Hawks boss Major-General Shadrack Sibiya, and the head of the Hawks team that allegedly handled renditions, Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie "Cowboy" Maluleka , were yesterday served with notices of intention to suspend them from duty. They are allegedly linked to the 2010 rendition of Zimbabwean s to their home country, where they were reportedly tortured.
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22 December 2014
GroundUp
There's a bullet lodged in Ali Hussein's body, somewhere between his right shoulder and neck. It has been there for nearly two months.
"My arm is dead," he says, showing his completely limp right arm, the result of the gunshot wound.
Hussein owns a spaza shop in Site B, Khayelitsha. His shop was robbed in October, and during the incident he was shot twice in the arm. One bullet went straight through his arm, and the other traveled from his elbow up through the arm to where it is now stuck behind his shoulder.
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