Reflecting on the significance of RSA Human Rights Day.

South Africa celebrates its Human Rights Day as a divided society. How we see each other puts the meaning of humans to the test. The founders of our constitutional order committed us to a society anchored on fundamental human rights. Being human comes with rights. Rights specify entitlement and confer power. The status of being human implies the inalienability of human rights. Wherever humanity is found, the universality of rights obtains. Unless violated, rights are assumed. The concept of human rights democratises human dignity. This context liquidates the pursuit of rights for exclusive categories or types of humans generally following race, creed, colour, and, lately, sexual orientation.  

The 1996 Constitution fundamentally reshaped our society, acknowledging our troubled past. This legal document made human rights an integral part of our sovereign existence, ensuring equality for all South Africans and extending its influence to every facet of our lives. 

 

The entrenchment of human rights in the Constitution and the obligation of state organs to respect, promote, protect, and fulfil them create a legal framework no legal person can bypass. The state is not only responsible for ensuring social and economic justice, human dignity, equality, and non-racialism, but it is also a weighty obligation that all must ensure human rights accrue to all people. 

 

Celebrated on a day when the brutality of state power was unleashed on people for simply protesting to be treated equally, RSA Human Rights Day happens in a context where a resurgence of some being equal to others looks unabated. The sophistication of the opposition to majority rule complex to rewire the constitutional order to have distinct 'minority rights' for a 'western community on the Southern tip of Africa' and 'other tribes' is indicative of inherent problems with the universal character of human rights. A Verwoedean separate development wave choked by the moral legitimacy and authority of non-racialism and human rights, struggles to resurrect itself as an appendage of a growing global rightwing wave.

 

While the Bill of Rights recognises property rights, including on property acquired through forced removals and state-sponsored dispossession, it also provides for restoration of title where dispossession was a means of acquisition. The essence of rights is to establish title and claim to unleash compensation and restitution dispensation with the pursuit of social justice as the supporting substrate. The human rights character of society, including the values underpinning the lived experience of the dominant, is influenced by those near the political establishment; this makes discourse on property rights conform to reigning property relations.

Equal to the land rights issue is the right to cultural self-expression, with language being the most potent currency to guarantee freedom of expression. Without vitiating the infrastructure arguments in favour of insisting on dual medium schools, the existence of single medium schools is a matter the Constitution expects the state to respect, promote, protect, and fulfil. That non-state actors litigate this for its continuity is an anomaly. Within a context and firmament of non-racialism, language rights are a matter of national interest as they express constitutional order.

The Human Rights Commission reports produced to protect the democratic order should be dusted, and recommendations therein mainstreamed to facilitate healing divisions of the past. To enable context-inspired human rights education programs, the state is expected to act in a way that reflects the nature of an emerging polity anchored on human dignity. There is an urgent need for evidence-based reporting on structural violations of the Bill of Human Rights provisions to anchor the inner logic of human rights. It should be doctrinal to live a human rights-based life. The best way to ensure that rights are guaranteed is to appreciate the inconvenience of the wrongs that could prevail in the absence of rights. Rights can, therefore, not exist outside of human experience.