Human Rights

SACSIS embraces a rights based approach to development, which views poverty as a denial of human rights.

Leering Glances: The Silence on Sexual Harassment is Untenable

Picture: Leah Green turns the tables on sexual harassment. Screenshot from her movie "Get Your Arse Out Mate". Gillian Schutte - Sexual harassment on the streets is a pervasive phenomenon that women from a range of racial and cultural backgrounds as well as social circumstances experience in daily life. Most men, even educated men from so-called respectable backgrounds belittle women’s experiences of sexual harassment. Internationally, this has led to a spate of new films and campaigns where women are calling attention to casual and more aggressive forms of sexual harassment by turning the tables on men. Their...

Are Corporate Social Investment Programmes Serious about Social Justice in South Africa?

Picture: Business Launchpad Alexander O'Riordan - Last week the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science held a two-day workshop on “Serious Social Investment” with respect to corporate social investment (CSI) in South Africa. The workshop, the fifth of its kind, focused on “initiating new conversations around the vision for South Africa and the benefits and value propositions for all involved in the CSI sector.” Clearly the organisers are calling for a clearer vision of the role of CSI in...

How Australia Continues to 'Breed Out the Color' of Its Aboriginal Population

Picture: Oxfam Australia John Pilger - The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads: "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because [as an Australian Aborigine] you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again.” A welfare official says, "I'm gonna take him, mate." This...

Radical U.N. Report Promotes Democratic Control of Food and an End to Corporate Domination

Picture: Jean-Marc Desfilhes/flickr Sonali Kolhatkar - A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on the “Right to Food” took aim at the entire basis on which food is produced and distributed on a global scale. Reflecting the type of progressive analysis of our food system from experts like Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan, report author Olivier De Schutter called for an undermining of large agribusinesses and an infusion of democratic control. Although the report’s recommendations are revolutionary,...

Homophobia on the March

Picture: Hello Artichoke Blogspot Richard Pithouse - Some people love and desire people of the same sex. This is true everywhere and it has always been true. From Egypt, to India, Peru and Zimbabwe there is ancient art illuminating the consummation of the eternal and universal presence of homosexual desire. In the classic literature of China, reaching back hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, it is described as the passion of the bitten peach. Homoerotic desire is described, with joy, in classic Arab poetry written more than a thousand...

Equality at the Heart of an Increasingly Popular Struggle to Decriminalise Dagga

Picture: Uruguay has legalised both production and consumption of Marijuana, courtesy m24digital.com. Dale T. McKinley - In the spirit of John Lennon, imagine this near-future scenario. It is 2016, the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution. Alongside all sorts of official festivities, a sizeable portion of the population is celebrating the recent decision by the Constitutional Court to declare the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act (No. 142 of 1992), a piece of legislation embedded in over a century of colonial, racist politics and wrapped in layers of ideologically and morally manipulated...