It made it possible to improve people's lives. Now it prevents all forms of discrimination in the world. It helps to improve our world.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/ijgr/16/3/article-p506_11.pdf

Human Rights Transformed: Positive Rights and Positive Duties

Equality or non-discrimination is one of the most frequently declared norms of international human rights law. The proliferation of variations of the equality norm, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews, including one million children. Although equality or non-discrimination is a dominant and recurring theme of international human rights law, the norm is not found in all the different sources of international law in a single, unified form. Nevertheless the subject of international law and the equality or non-discrimination norm can be approached in terms of definitional issues for which international legal materials provide useful solutions. Alternatively, the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee might be interpreted as attempting to introduce here a kind of tort notion of forseeability in which some results would not be considered as true consequences of discriminatory rules or their application.

The Principle of Equality Ornon-Discrimination in International Law

This article focuses on the South African judiciary and, in particular, the South African Constitutional Court’s approach to the adjudication of the equality right in the Bill of Rights during the twenty-year period since the official end of apartheid. The article does this by evaluating a necessarily select number of cases dealing with equality that have come before the Constitutional Court to find out whether the Court has consistently adopted a substantive notion of equality in its deliberations, an approach encouraged by the equality clause itself. The article offers some suggestions for both the South African Constitutional and others courts when engaging in equality rights adjudication. The article is a clarion call for the judiciary to adopt a contextual, robust and vigilant approach to equality and other rights adjudication.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2610025_code1207125.pdf?abstractid=2610025&mirid=1&type=2

Equality Constitutional Adjudication in South Africa

The impact of climate change on the availability of water affects all types of land use and sectors. This complexity calls for integrated water resources management and negotiations between sectors on the most important, cost‐effective, and productive allocation of water where it is a limited resource. This reflection paper shows examples of adaptation efforts to water scarcity at a scale where gains in water productivity can be derived from inter‐sectoral water reuse and wastewater–freshwater swaps, complementing other water scarcity coping strategies (water savings, long‐distance transfer, and desalination). Wastewater treatment for reuse offers opportunities across scales as it allows, for example, donor regions to be compensated with reclaimed water for the release of freshwater for higher‐value use, increasing overall economic water productivity in this way. In such water swaps, farmers are compensated with higher water volumes in exchange for higher quality. The reuse of water between sectors offers opportunities to (i) expand the traditional (agricultural) water productivity concept and (ii) significantly increase water productivity at the system level. While rural–urban water reallocation can help mitigate the impacts of climate change, compensating farmers with reclaimed water remains limited for the reasons discussed in the paper.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ird.2694

Water reuse to free up freshwater for higher‐value use and increase climate resilience and water productivity

Water is an essential necessity for human beings; however, South Africa has a long history of inequalities dating back to apartheid politics and legislation which denied access to water to disadvantaged black populations mostly residing in rural areas. Although apartheid has officially ended, whether the lack of access to water by such populations who still cannot afford it exists and aligns with international human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination merits an examination. To redress the injustices of the apartheid regime, the right to have access to sufficient water is entrenched in section 27(1)(b) of the 1996 South African Constitution. In addition to embracing equality and non-discrimination, the Constitution informs other instruments and measures such as free basic water policy and pre-paid meters meant to ensure access to water. However, the plight of these populations persists in post-apartheid South Africa, but it is rarely a subject of academic scrutiny how the notion of affirmative action as grounded in the principles of equality and non-discrimination under human rights law can be deployed as a response. Using a doctrinal research approach, this article argues that the continuing struggle of disadvantaged communities with access to water does not only constitute water apartheid, it negates the human rights principles of equality and non-discrimination. The principle of affirmative action is useful in responding to inadequate access to sufficient water by disadvantaged populations in post-apartheid South Africa.

Pumzile Shikwambane

Papers

Water ‘Apartheid’ and the Significance of Human Rights Principles of Affirmative Action in South Africa