CALS Quarterly Issue 29
- Lee-Anne Gaertner
Read the latest issue of our quarterly newsletter and catch up on our recent highlights
CALS marked this Women’s Month by celebrating our history, including honouring the women who have helped to shape our organisation and looking back at some of the landmark cases we’ve been involved in. We ended the month with our Director Prof Christopher Gevers reflecting on the unacknowledged contributions of Black feminists – such as Alice Kinloch, Anna Julia Cooper and Miriam Makeba – in the formation of our organisation and the social justice sector in South Africa more generally.
Our Gender Justice programme is hoping to make history again this month with an appeal heard in the Constitutional Court on 25 September which has the potential to change the way sexual offences are prosecuted. We were represented in court by in-house counsel Mx Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane and head of Gender Justice Dr Sheena Swemmer. Read Sheena’s thoughts on the case.
In other news, our Civil & Political Justice team recently co-hosted the 3rd annual Activist Symposium in partnership with eleven other organisations working on activist victimisation. The Symposium brought together human rights defenders from around the continent to discuss shared challenges and strategise on resisting repression in the ‘anti-human rights’ era.
Our Home, Land and Rural Democracy programme recently celebrated reaching an agreement on behalf of former land tenants of Bushy Park Farm in the Eastern Cape. Our clients have been relocated to a new property by the farm owners following our intervention. We continue to represent other families in negotiations to ensure they have secure land tenure.
Finally, CALS hosted the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) and Reform Initiatives for a two-day expert consultation on the right to reparations in Africa. The consultation ended with establishing the Pan African Working Group on the Right to Reparations, a platform led by civil society organisations which aims to co-ordinate and advance action on reparations in Africa.
Click the image below for more about this appointment and our other recent updates.
