Need a new mindset to promote human rights
Human Rights Day is celebrated annually across the world on 10 December honouring the United Nation’s adoption on 10 December 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As we observe this special day, let us remember that human rights are an expression of our God-given rights, which are now universally recognized. Our rights can only gain a social status when they become moral values and are maintained as a necessary quality of human relationships. Protection and promotions of human rights, in the Bahá’í view, requires transformation of thoughts, values and attitudes. To affect any degree of transformation, however, it…
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Same-sex couples enjoy more inheritance rights than heterosexual couples
South Africa must be the only country in the world where – on paper, at least – same-sex couples enjoy more legal protection than heterosexual couples. Before same-sex marriage was legalised in South Africa, the Constitutional Court extended many of the legal rights and privileges associated with marriage to some same-sex couples. However, influenced by a rather moralistic view of marriage, it declined to extend the appropriate legal protection to similarly situated unmarried heterosexual couples. Last week the Constitutional Court was once again confronted by this failure, but only the minority decision addressed the problem head-on. Before Parliament extended the…
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Let’s all play our part in nurturing social justice
The unsettling reality that just under half of the people who go to work each day earn less than R20 an hour or R3 500 a month is an indictment that should galvanise all South Africans into ending the phenomenon of “the working poor” in our economy and society. In 2016, apartheid’s shadow of poverty, unemployment and inequality still casts a troubling pall over the salary advice slips of millions of South Africans. Income poverty undermines the dignity of workers and their ability to attain the better life of which we speak so often about and which our constitution implores…
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