The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS embraces a rights based approach to development, which views poverty as a denial of human rights.
Liepollo Pheko -
There are currently about 200 million people living outside their countries of birth. Worldwide the rate of migration grew at six percent a year during the 1990s, a rate faster than population growth as a whole.
Better opportunities for employment are among the main reasons people choose to migrate.
According to the Pew Hispanic Centre, 11% of everyone born in Mexico is currently living the United States in search of better opportunities in the world’s biggest economy. At...
Glenn Ashton -
Death remains a taboo subject. Ending ones own life, as in suicide, in assisted suicide or even in medically supervised termination of life, is seldom discussed. Death and dying is only raised at the end of ones life, at a time of weakness when we cannot properly deal with such a demanding matter.
Death is so profoundly taboo that the media, if it does discuss it at all, generally takes a partisan view, echoing established dogma, citing tired moral, religious or ethical issues. The...
Richard Pithouse -
The fear of violence, like the fear of monsters, is primal and universal. But the sensitive middle class soul who professes a deep revulsion at all forms of violence is quite likely to call the police or a private security company if he wakes to the sound of breaking glass. Violence is seldom renounced in the absolute. It is more usually outsourced.
In the global public sphere horror at violence is far from equitable. Four and a half million people died in the war in the Congo with a small...
Richard Pithouse -
In recent weeks the centre of the unstable and diverse social ferment that has been bubbling and boiling at the base of South African society since at least 2004 has shifted to Cape Town. People have often remarked that the conflict on the slopes of the Sentinel in Hout Bay, in which four people lost their eyes to rubber bullets fired by the police, has evoked the past.
But our cities are the most unequal in the world and many of our people are holding firmly to the promise of inclusion in a...
Liepollo Pheko -
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” Winston Churchill said during World War II.
A few weeks ago, the orgy of grief that accompanied the commemoration of 9/11 in the United States was televised across our television screens. It was replete with scenes of the fallen men and women and their grieving families and compatriots. It was human and dignified and even those of us who reject the ensuing War on Terror could understand and share in that loss and the grief....
Glenn Ashton -
Our constitution is clear about equal rights. It unambiguously says; “Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.” It goes further to clarify that there is to be no discrimination on any grounds – age, race, sex, religion, class and so on. Justice is meant to be blind to individual circumstance.
One can argue that equality is ensured through, say, the right to representation of anyone charged with a crime, or by the fact...
