Keyword: Human Rights Day

What Would a Meaningful Agenda for Human Rights Day in South Africa Look Like?

Picture: The Mass Burial of the Victims of the Sharpeville Massacre courtesy Baileys African History Archive Jane Duncan - On 21 March 1960, the apartheid police opened fire on a crowd of protestors in Sharpeville, killing 69 people. Five decades on, post-apartheid South Africa remembers these events on Human Rights Day. The government has attempted to depoliticise the event, shifting the day from one that is associated with the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to one that South Africans generally commemorate, irrespective of their political persuasions. Yet the annual commemoration of this day did not stop a...

Human Rights Have Done Nothing for My Poverty

Picture: Steve Crane Saliem Fakir - The expression, as phrased here, is an attempt to demonstrate the hollowness of human rights and a rights based constitution if all they are can be reduced to normative ideals written on fine paper with no material effect on those that matter. Or as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham once mockingly called it, a mere exercise in “bawling upon paper.” To phrase it differently: What is the point of political justice when there is no economic justice? Is it good enough to say...