Rights-based Litigation, Urban Governance and Social Justice in South Africa: The Right to Joburg
2017, Routledge / Taylor & Francis
A study of the impact of rights-based litigation on urban governance and the urban form, this book deals with the overlap between legal and everyday struggles for social and spatial justice in the particular physical context of the city of Johannesburg, South Africa.
The book considers the impact of the legal assertion of different aspects of the so-called “right to the city” on the urban residents who perform it, the places in which they find themselves and the government that must balance their competing demands whilst delivering on constitutional mandates.
Drawing from literature across disciplines of law, urban geography, urban theory and urban planning, as well as from reported case-law considering the invocation of a range of rights in the specific context of urban local government, the book engages historical and contemporary legal and popular struggles for urban housing, essential service delivery, public presence, livelihood, property, commercial interests, inclusion, safety, and sexual liberty.
Cautiously celebrating the justiciability of various constituent elements of the “right to the city”, the book is one of the first considering the particular socio-spatial ramifications of rights-based judicial review.
Through evaluating the interpretative and remedial practices of the South African Constitutional Court, it at once aims to better understand the bureaucratic impact of judicial power and the way in which law shapes urban space.
Available in hardcover and as e-book.
Can Rights Cure? The Impact of Human Rights Litigation on South Africa’s Health System
2014, Pretoria University Law Press (PULP)
Can Rights Cure? considers the ways in which different aspects of South Africa’s struggling health system have responded to the justiciability of a range of constitutional rights associated with the international-law right to health.
Topics covered include the impact of rights-based litigation on the formulation and implementation of health laws and policies, as well as on processes of health resource allocation and rationing, the regulation of health care service delivery in the private sector, and the protection and promotion of public health.
Building on years of work contemplating the enforcement of the right to have access to health care services and the transformative potential of the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court, Can Rights Cure? advances novel arguments on the bureaucratic impact of socio-economic rights litigation, the human rights obligations of “private” institutions and the rights-based scrutiny of political resource allocation decisions.
Marius Pieterse 