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Arthur Chaskalson
Arthur Chaskalson SCOB, (24 November 1931 – 1 December 2012) was President of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1994 to 2001 and Chief Justice of South Africa from 2001 to 2005. Chaskalson was a member of the defence team in the Rivonia Trial of 1963. Early life and career Born in Johannesburg, Chaskalson was educated at Hilton College and later graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BCom (1952) and LLB Cum Laude (1954). In 1963, Chaskalson, along with Bram Fischer, Joel Joffe, Harry Schwarz, George Bizos, Vernon Berrangé and Harold Hanson, was part of the former President Nelson Mandela's defence team in the Rivonia Trial, which saw Mandela sentenced to life imprisonment. Chaskalson left a very successful legal practice to become a human rights lawyer, helping to establish the Legal Resources Centre, a non-profit organisation modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the United States seeking to use the law to pursue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Chief Justice Of South Africa
The chief justice of South Africa is the most senior judge of the Constitutional Court and head of the judiciary of South Africa, who exercises final authority over the functioning and management of all the courts. The position of chief justice was created upon the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, with the chief justice of the Cape Colony, Sir (John) Henry de Villiers (later created The 1st Baron de Villiers), being appointed the first chief justice of the newly created Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa. Until 1961, the chief justice held a dormant commission as Officer Administering the Government, meaning that if the governor-general died or was incapacitated the chief justice would exercise the powers and duties of the governor-general. This commission was invoked in 1943 under Nicolaas Jacobus de Wet, and in 1959 and 1961 under Lucas Cornelius Steyn. History and creation of the post The position of chief justice as it stands today ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
George Bizos
George Bizos (; 14 November 19279 September 2020) was a Greek-South African human rights lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in South Africa. He was noted for representing Nelson Mandela during the Rivonia Trial. He instructed Mandela to add the qualification "if needs be" to his trial address, which is credited with sparing him from a sentence of death. Bizos also represented the families of anti-apartheid activists killed by the government, throughout the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He also represented victims of the Marikana massacre. Early life Bizos was the son of Antonios "Antoni" Bizos, the mayor of the small village of Vasilitsi, south of Koroni and Kalamata on the Messenia peninsula of the Peloponnese, Greece. He was born on 14 November 1927, although this was erroneously recorded on his South African identity documents as 1928, owing to his father's declaration to the authorities upon arrival in Egypt. In May 1941 at the age of thir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Richard Goldstone
Richard Joseph Goldstone (born 26 October 1938) is a South African retired judge who served in the Constitutional Court of South Africa from July 1994 to October 2003. He joined the bench as a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, first in the Transvaal Provincial Division from 1980 to 1989 and then in the Appellate Division (South Africa), Appellate Division from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was a commercial lawyer in Johannesburg, where he entered legal practice in 1963 and Senior counsel, took silk in 1976. He is considered to be one of several liberal judges who issued key rulings that undermined apartheid from within the system by tempering the worst effects of the country's racial laws. Among other important rulings, Goldstone made the Group Areas Act – under which non-whites were banned from living in "whites only" areas – virtually unworkable by restricting evictions. As a result, prosecutions under the act virtually ceased. During the transition from aparthe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Fedsure Life Assurance V Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council
''Fedsure Life Assurance Ltd and Others v Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council and Others'' is an important case in South African law, heard in the Constitutional Court on 18 and 20 August 1998, with judgment handed down 14 October. The bench was occupied by Chaskalson P, Langa DP, Ackermann J, Goldstone J, Kriegler J, Madala J, Mokgoro J, O'Regan J, Sachs J and Yacoob J. DJB Osborn (with him PJ Van Blerk) appeared for the appellants, RM Wise (with him J. Kentridge) for the first respondent, and CZ Cohen (with him M. Chaskalson) for the second, third, fourth and fifth respondent. Principles The interim Constitution recognises and makes provision for three levels of government: national, provincial and local. Each level of government derives its powers from the interim Constitution. In the case of local government, however, the powers are subject to definition and regulation by either the national or the provincial governments, which are the "competent authori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Minister Of Public Works V Kyalami Ridge Environmental Association
''Minister of Public Works and Others v Kyalami Ridge Environmental Association and Others'', an important case in South African law, was decided by the Constitutional Court on May 29, 2001. Facts The South African government established a transit camp on state-owned land which had previously been used as a prison farm. The purpose of the camp was to house those people from the Alexandra Township who had been displaced by severe floods. The intention was that the persons so accommodated would move to permanent housing when such became available, and that the transit camp would then be dismantled. This plan was made without any prior discussions with residents in the area. A residents' association called on the Minister of Public Works to suspend operations, contending that the establishment of the transit camp involved an alteration in the use of the land, and was being carried out in contravention of the Environment Conservation Act and the National Environmental Management A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Soobramoney V Minister Of Health, KwaZulu-Natal
''Soobramoney v Minister of Health, KwaZulu-Natal'' is an important judgment of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, delivered in 1997, and the first in which the court had to adjudicate on the universal constitutional right to medical treatment as against the problem of an under-resourced health care system. Facts Thiagraj Soobramoney was terminally ill, suffering from ischaemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, and of limited means. His kidneys had failed in 1996, and his condition had been diagnosed as irreversible. To survive even for a while, he required renal dialysis. After exhausting his funds on private providers, he sought the treatment free from the dialysis program of the Addington Hospital, a state-funded institution in Durban, which rejected him on the grounds that his condition did not fulfill the requirements for eligibility: that he be curable within a short period of time, and that, as for his kidney failure, he be eligible for a kidney transplant. ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
S V Makwanyane
''S v Makwanyane and Another'' (CCT 3/94) was a landmark 1995 judgment of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It established that capital punishment was inconsistent with the commitment to human rights expressed in the Interim Constitution. The court's ruling invalidated section 277(1)(a) of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977, which had provided for use of the death penalty, along with any similar provisions in any other law in force in South Africa. The court also forbade the government from carrying out the death sentence on any prisoners awaiting execution, ruling that they should remain in prison until new sentences were imposed. Delivered on 6 June, this was the newly established court's "first politically important and publicly controversial holding." Chance The Court held that, in practice, there was an element of chance at every stage of the process of implementing the death penalty: The outcome may be dependent upon factors such as the way the case is inves ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Death Penalty
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in such a manner is called a death sentence, and the act of carrying out the sentence is an execution. A prisoner who has been sentenced to death and awaits execution is ''condemned'' and is commonly referred to as being "on death row". Etymologically, the term ''capital'' (, derived via the Latin ' from ', "head") refers to execution by beheading, but executions are carried out by many methods, including hanging, shooting, lethal injection, stoning, electrocution, and gassing. Crimes that are punishable by death are known as ''capital crimes'', ''capital offences'', or ''capital felonies'', and vary depending on the jurisdiction, but commonly include serious crimes against a person, such as murder, assassination, mass murder, child ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Interim Constitution Of South Africa
The Interim Constitution was the fundamental law of South Africa from during the first non-racial general election on 27 April 1994 until it was superseded by the final constitution on 4 February 1997. As a transitional constitution it required the newly elected Parliament to also serve as a constituent assembly to adopt a final constitution. It made provision for a major restructuring of government as a consequence of the abolition of apartheid. It also introduced an entrenched bill of rights against which legislation and government action could be tested, and created the Constitutional Court with broad powers of judicial review. History An integral part of the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa was the creation of a new, non-discriminatory constitution for the country. One of the major disputed issues was the process by which such a constitution would be adopted. The African National Congress (ANC) insisted that it should be drawn up by a democratically elected ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Multi-party Negotiating Forum
The apartheid system in South Africa was ended through a series of bilateral and multi-party negotiations between 1990 and 1993. The negotiations culminated in the passage of a new interim Constitution in 1993, a precursor to the Constitution of 1996; and in South Africa's first non-racial elections in 1994, won by the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement. Although there had been gestures towards negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s, the process accelerated in 1990, when the government of F. W. de Klerk took a number of unilateral steps towards reform, including releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and unbanning the ANC and other political organisations. In 1990–91, bilateral "talks about talks" between the ANC and the government established the pre-conditions for substantive negotiations, codified in the Groote Schuur Minute and Pretoria Minute. The first multi-party agreement on the desirability of a negotiated settlement was the 1991 National Peace Accord, c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Apartheid Legislation In South Africa
The system of racial segregation and oppression in South Africa known as ''apartheid'' was implemented and enforced by many acts and other laws. This legislation served to institutionalize racial discrimination and the dominance by white people over people of other races. While the bulk of this legislation was enacted after the election of the National Party government in 1948, it was preceded by discriminatory legislation enacted under earlier British and Afrikaner governments. Apartheid is distinguished from segregation in other countries by the systematic way in which it was formalized in law. Segregationist legislation before apartheid Although apartheid as a comprehensive legislative project truly began after the National Party came into power in 1948, many of these statutes were preceded by the laws of the previous British and Afrikaner administrations in South Africa's provinces. An early example is the Glen Grey Act, passed in 1894 in Cape Colony, and which had the ef ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
NAACP Legal Defense And Educational Fund
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (NAACP LDF, the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF) is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City. LDF is wholly independent and separate from the NAACP. Although LDF can trace its origins to the legal department of the NAACP created by Charles Hamilton Houston in the 1930s, Thurgood Marshall founded LDF as a separate legal entity in 1940, which became totally independent from the NAACP in 1957. Janai Nelson serves as the eighth President and Director-Counsel, since March 2022. Previous Director-Counsels include Sherrilyn Ifill (2012–2022), John Payton (2008–2012), Ted Shaw (2004–2008), Elaine Jones (1993–2004), Julius Levonne Chambers (1984–1993), Jack Greenberg (1961–1984), and founder Thurgood Marshall (1940–1961). Overview While primarily focused on the civil rights of African Americans in the U.S., LDF states it has "been instrumental in the formation of similar organizations ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
