CALS Quarterly Issue 33
- Lee-Anne Gaertner
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We find ourselves at a moment of profound grief and anger. In recent weeks, eleven women have been killed in Ekurhuleni – devastating losses that reflect a much wider crisis of gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa. These deaths cannot be treated as isolated tragedies. They are part of a systemic failure to protect women from violence, despite the strong constitutional and legislative protections that exist. What South Africa urgently needs is not more laws, but meaningful implementation: responsive policing, effective prosecutions, properly functioning courts, adequately funded support services and accountability when the state fails in its duties to protect.
The need to hold institutions and systems accountable runs through much of our work. In August, CALS appeared before the Supreme Court of Appeal representing the Global Center on AI Governance as a friend of the court in litigation concerning the Social Relief of Distress grant. Our submissions focused on the human rights implications of using algorithms and automated decision-making to determine access to social assistance, and on the risks these technologies may pose to fairness, transparency and equality when deployed without adequate safeguards.
We have also continued working alongside activists and civil society partners to strengthen collective responses to repression and shrinking civic space, including through our annual Activist Symposium. At the same time, our Environmental Justice programme has engaged with proposed changes to mining legislation, submitting comments on provisions that would introduce harsher penalties for mining without a permit and considering their implications for mining-affected communities.
Across these different areas of work, the underlying demand is the same: rights must mean something in practice. Whether confronting gender-based violence, protecting access to social assistance, defending activists or engaging with law and policy, accountability requires more than commitments on paper. It requires institutions that act, systems that protect rather than exclude, and meaningful space for the people most affected to shape the decisions that govern their lives.
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