In this week’s post, Marthinus van Staden and Grey Stopforth expose a blind spot in South African labour law: grandparents and other caregivers may shoulder the day-to-day work of raising children, however they remain excluded from parental leave. The authors argue that African regional instruments already highlight the need to support caregivers. It is national labour law that needs to catch up.

In this week’s post, Etoe Ruddy Carine Tchuekam argues that AI-driven inequality in Africa goes beyond the digital divide. When bias is embedded in data and algorithms, existing inequalities can be reproduced in ways that are difficult to see or challenge. She calls for a new approach to equality—one that is preventive, accountable, participatory, and equitable, ensuring that African women and marginalised communities help shape, and benefit from, Africa’s AI future.

This week, Dr. Meghan Finn notes that South Africa’s equality legislation was drafted, deliberately and against sustained resistance, to reach discrimination in the private sphere as well as by the state. She further notes that twenty-six years on, some of its most important provisions for targeting privatised inequality remain dormant. The result is a striking gap between an ambitious statutory scheme as the drafting archive reveals, and its operation.

In this week's post, Prof Franaaz Khan argues that African human rights law should recognise neurodivergence as an equality issue, not merely a disability issue. Drawing on the African Charter, the Mali decision, and South Africa's Western Cape Forum case, the piece contends that the legal tools to protect neurodivergent people already exist. What is needed is a willingness to interpret equality more inclusively and ensure that those whose exclusion has long gone unseen receive meaningful legal protection.

Drawing on her publication in CCR XIV, Prof. Fatima Osman examines the South African Constitutional Court's decision to depart from the precedent set in Volks v Robinson, where the court held that unmarried partners who chose not to marry could not claim maintenance under the Maintenance of Surviving Spouses Act (MSSA). In Bwanya, the court declared provisions of the Intestate Succession Act (ISA) and MSSA unconstitutional insofar as they excluded life partners who had undertaken reciprocal duties of support.

Ahead of her upcoming publication in CCR XIV, Dr Rishika Sahgal analyses and critiques two cases decided by the apex courts in India and South Africa in 2022, Janhit Abhiyan and Social Justice Coalition. These cases reveal that even when poverty is recognised as a ground within equality law, several tensions or barriers to achieving substantive equality for the impoverished may arise.

In this post, Wandile Brian Zondo and Nomfundo Ramalekana discuss a recent judgment by the High Court of Namibia declaring the common law crimes of sodomy and unnatural sexual offences unconstitutional, and sequentially invalid. The authors examine how the High Court interpreted the Constitution of Namibia to reach this conclusion and posit that this decision marks a momentous step towards the full realization of LGBTQI+ rights in Namibia and serves as a beacon of hope for the region.

United Nations Special Rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter calls for an end to ‘povertyism’ - the discrimination & negative attitudes that bar people in poverty from fully accessing their rights and for states to include socio-economic status as a suspect ground in national anti-discrimination frameworks.

Bwanya v Master of the High Court was the first occasion on which the Constitutional Court expressly refused to follow one of its previous decisions. Joshua Davis considers the basis on which it did so and the implications for the doctrine of precedent, and argues that the judgment was ultimately right for the wrong reasons.

A snapshot of women’s political participation in The Gambia shows that there is an urgent need to adopt special measures to increase women’s access to political participation.