South Africa is notorious for being the ‘rape capital of the world.’ The new Sexual Offences Bill introduces a number of legal reforms intended to improve the handling of sexual offences cases. But these new reform efforts will not have the desired impact if laws are not properly implemented or interpreted. It is argued that we need to pay urgent attention to the unacceptable high number of cases that drop out of the system, and ensure that victims are given the tools and support to participate effectively in the legal process.
South Africa embraced constitutional democracy in 1994 following the collapse of the Apartheid regime. The constitution that was finally passed in 1996 promised the development of a social democratic society. Within two decades, much of the promise contained in its constitutional instrument had been hollowed out. This paper considers the manner in which the ruling party, the African National Congress, embraced a project termed State Capture in which the key guardrails of constitutional democracy were transformed into instruments for the perpetuation of rent seeking by a political elite who effectively eschewed the social democratic project begun in 1994. Apart from the rapacious effect of rent captures the ANC continues to be guided by the idea of democratic centralism in which all its members of the National Parliament place the interests of the party above those of the constitution and thus the nation. Within this context constitutional democracy is viewed as the enemy of the people, personified by the Party. In addition, the paper describes the rise of political populism, the continued high levels of inequality and the vested interests of traditional leaders. It then examines the manner in which these conditions may bring about the replacement of constitutional democracy with a form of autocratic legalism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.