A revisionary account of the South African Constitutional Court, its working method and the neglected political underpinnings of its success.

Over the last fifteen years, the South African postapartheid Transitional Amnesty Process – implemented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators from around the world and from almost every discipline of human sciences. Lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists as well as political scientists have tried to understand, describe and comment on the ‘shocking’ South African political decision to give amnesty to all who fully disclosed their politically motivated crimes committed during the apartheid era. Investigating the postapartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the postapartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems. Both processes contain mechanisms that encourage the constitution of the unity of the political body while ensuring future solidity and stability. From this perspective, the book deals with the importance of several concepts such as truth about the past, publicly shared memory, unity of the political body and public confession.

Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, this scholarly work provides an in-depth and thorough analysis of the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of the newly democratic South Africa. The book explores how the judicial interpretation and enforcement of socio-economic rights can be more responsive to the conditions of systemic poverty and inequality characterising South African society. Based on meticulous research, the work marries legal analysis with perspectives from political philosophy and democratic theory.

In a book which offers a unique range of perspectives on the development of South Africa's Interim and final Constitutions, scholars, practising lawyers, members of the judiciary and the Human Rights Commission, and political leaders illuminate the many issues of process, substance and context presented by the Constitutions. Essays on process make clear the challenges and the triumphs of South Africa's constitutional rebirth. The authors examine such questions as the extent of popular involvement in South Africa's exercise in constitution writing, the impact of political force, human transformation, and reasoned persuasion on the agreements that were reached, and the Constitutional Court's extraordinary role in assessing the negotiators' efforts. Contributions on the substance of the Constitution address both its human rights provisions and issues of governmental structure and institutional context. The articles on rights attest to the breadth of the new rights protections, with essays on free speech, socio-economic rights and their application to private actors, women's rights, traditional authority, cultural rights, and the rights of non-citizens. Chapters on structure and context reflect how important the institutions through which a government operates are to the actual implementation of the Constitution's aspirations. These wide-ranging pieces look at three of the newly created structures of South African government -- the federal aspects of the Constitutions, the Constitutional Court, and the Human Rights Commission -- and at the process of change in the criminal justice system, a particularly important institution carried over from an old order.

The preamble to the post-apartheid South African constitution states that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity’ and promises to ‘lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law’ and to ‘improve the quality of life of all citizens’. This would seem to commit the South African government to, amongst other things, the implementation of policies aimed at fostering a common sense of South African national identity, at societal dev- opment and at reducing of levels of social inequality. However, in the period of more than a decade that has now elapsed since the end of apartheid, there has been widespread discontent with regard to the degree of progress made in connection with the realisation of these constitutional aspirations. The ‘limits to liberation’ in the post-apartheid era has been a theme of much recent research in the ?elds of sociology and political theory (e. g. Luckham, 1998; Robins, 2005a). Linguists have also paid considerable attention to the South African situation with the realisation that many of the factors that have prevented, and are continuing to prevent, effective progress towards the achievement of these constitutional goals are linguistic in their origin.

This book sets out to assess the role and impact of socio-economic strategies used by civil society actors in South Africa. Focusing on a range of socio-economic rights and national trends in law and political economy, the book's authors show how socio-economic rights have influenced the development of civil society discourse and action.