In this post, Marthinus van Staden and Michele van Eck highlight a significant oversight in South Africa’s labour law framework, which allows employers to unilaterally alter working conditions without employees' explicit consent. This gap disproportionately affects vulnerable groups, who struggle to navigate contracts laden with complex legal jargon. The authors advocate for labour law reforms mandating written employment contracts and the use of plain language in all employment-related documentation.

In this post, Ester Stefanelli provides a detailed account of Mozambique's recent elections as well as the events that led to subsequent protests and disputes over the results. She argues that the Mozambican crisis underscores the limitations of formal elections, which can reflect incomplete constitutional transitions and may even hinder the process of democratic consolidation.

The African Law Matters blog is pleased to announce that our 2024 Year End Anthology is now available online. This showcases the blog’s work and the editors’ selected publications from 2024 and can be accessed directly from this blog post.

In this post, Justin critiques the Constitutional Court’s decision in Damons, which narrowly interpreted the duty of reasonable accommodation under the Employment Equity Act. He argues that the ruling weakens protections for persons with disabilities by limiting accommodation to meeting existing job requirements rather than transforming workplaces for inclusion. Justin advocates for a substantive equality approach, emphasizing that reasonable accommodation should not just integrate disabled employees but also reshape work environments to be more inclusive and accessible.

In this post, Meghan Campbell and Ben Warwick explain how gender inequality isn’t just about differences in status or resources—it’s also about time. The duo, observe that women often experience 'time poverty' due to unpaid domestic work, while legal systems tend to overlook how inequality develops gradually. Through case law, the authors show how rigid timelines can prevent women from accessing justice. They argue that more flexible, time-sensitive legal approaches are needed to address these structural inequalities and promote lasting gender equality.

In this post, Martha Bradley and Marko Svičevič explore how President Cyril Ramaphosa’s statement that South Africa’s military presence in the DRC is “not a declaration of war” raises critical questions under international humanitarian law. They further examine the legal implications of classifying an armed conflict as either an international or non-international armed conflict and the legal implications this holds for the parties involved.

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.