This is up from 87 at the end of 2018 By Liezl Human The South African judiciary published a national report on reserved judgments across all South African courts, dated 30 September. The report shows that at the beginning of the fourth term of 2019 there were 103 reserved judgments outstanding for longer than six months and, overall, 683 reserved judgments outstanding. A previous report by the...

Farm workers in the Western Cape winelands are still living in single-sex hostels at Oak Valley, as they were during apartheid. Now they are taking legal action. By Ra’eesa Pather In the pristine lands of one of the Western Cape’s best known farms, workers are restless. After months of negotiations and protest action, they have filed a court application for a...

More than 50 tenants of a derelict building in Hillbrow have taken their landlord to the Constitutional Court. When can a landlord evict law-abiding tenants in order to effect refurbishments? And when can a landlord evict tenants for this reason on an urgent basis? These two questions are currently before the Constitutional Court in an application for leave to appeal...

New Wild Coast route shortens road by 75km but passes through ancestral land By Zoë Postman The South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL), the Department of Environmental Affairs and Sinegugu Zukulu, a resident of the Umgungundlovu community in the Eastern Cape, were back in court on Monday over the construction of the N2 Highway through the Wild Coast. The new road extends about 560km between...

Constitutional Court ruling overturns Home Affairs directive By Ohene Yaw Ampofo-Anti If you are an asylum seeker and your application to be a refugee is refused, you are still allowed to apply for a visa. The Constitutional Court ruled this in a unanimous judgment handed down in October. Background The case was brought by three asylum seekers whose applications for refugee status had been refused. They...

Gwede Mantashe is concerned about mining being halted, but the judgment is an incentive for the industry to change the way it operates By Wilmien Wicomb South Africans have spent much of 2018 debating whether the Constitution must be amended to explicitly provide for expropriation of land without compensation. Lost in this debate is the reality that thousands of South Africans have...

Interdict application to halt operations at the Somkhele coal mine thrown out with costs By Fred Kockott A high court bid to close down Somkhele coal mine on the border of Hlhulhuwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal was yesterday dismissed with costs. The interdict application to halt operations at the Somkhele coal mine – one of the country’s largest suppliers of anthracite – was brought...

By Sophia Wilhelm and Tara Osborne After publication of this article we received complaints that the list provided by the spokesperson for the judiciary is inaccurate. It contains many judgments which have actually been delivered. At 14:22 on Friday 28 September we received this letter from the spokesperson: RE: REQUEST FOR WITHDRAWAL OF ARTICLE The article published on GroundUp on 27 September 2018 titled “Two...