South African Crime Quarterly 62
In this edition: protest and the law, public opinion on protest, policing protest, and protest and rights.
SACQ is published in partnership with the Centre for Criminology at the University of Cape Town. To access individual articles, refer to the table of contents below.
Articles in this edition illustrate the ways that academics, activists, lawyers and practitioners are engaging with questions of protest and response. Two articles address the law on protest. Chamberlain and Snyman survey the protest landscape through the lens of the public interest legal sector, and question, through the experience of Right2Protest, the ways in which court processes are being used as tools with which to quash protest activities. Omar uses the Social Justice Coalition’s challenge to the Regulation of Gatherings Act (RGA) to highlight the controversies around the Act’s regulatory provisions.
Two articles focus on protest related to the right to basic education. Ally argues that the current legal framework on protest fails to protect and enable children’s right to protest, and uses the case of Mlungwana and Others v State and Others to show how the criminalisation of peaceful protest not only violates the state’s responsibility but also fails to take into account the best interests of children.Focusing on the South African Schools Act, Skelton and Nsibirwa show tensions between the right to protest and to basic education. Problematizing the implementation if provisions that create criminal accountability in the context of protest (including parents’ decisions to keep children out of school), they argue that holding protesters accountable under criminal law may be desirable, but that the proposed amendments to the Schools Act do not resolve these practical tensions.
Mukumba and Abdullah use a series of Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) requests to municipalities to test how easily accessible information is on where and how to submit a notice of gathering, as required by the RGA. They show that information is scarce, and compliance uneven across the country, finding that this amounts to active resistance by government to enabling the right to protest.
Two research articles look at public opinion on protest. Roberts et al., examine views of police performance in dealing with protests, finding that this is negative on the whole, and that roughly a third of South Africans feel that the police are never justified in using force in these situations. Bohler-Muller et al., focus on patterns of support for different forms of protest action across various socio-demographic and geographic variables. Surprisingly, the authors find no considerable differences across age, gender, race and class in the public’s support for protest, although people are more likely to support protest if they think it will be successful.
The case note by Abdool Karim and Kruyer analyses Rhodes University v Student Representative Council of Rhodes University, and Bond reviews Jane Duncan’s The rise of the securocrats and Protest nation.
Table of contents - SACQ 62
Editorial
Protest protections, protest problems? Reflections from across the spectrum.
Kelley Moult
Commentary and analysis
Research articles
- #SchoolsOnFire: Criminal justice responses to protests that impede the right to basic education
Ann Skelton, Martin Nsibirwa
- Enabling the enabler: Using access to information to ensure the right to peaceful protest
Tsangadzaome Alexander Mukumba, Imraan Abdullah
- Protest Blues: Public opinion on the policing of protest in South Africa
Benjamin James Roberts, Narnia Bohler-Muller, Jare Struwig, Steven Lawrence Gordon, Ngqapheli Mchunu, Samela Mtyingizane, Carin Runciman
- Minding the Protest: Attitudes towards different forms of protest action in contemporary South Africa
Narnia Bohler-Muller, Benjamin James Roberts, Jare Struwig, Steven Lawrence Gordon, Thobeka Radebe, Peter Alexander
Case notes
Rhodes University v Student Representative Council of Rhodes University: The constitutionality of interdicting non-violent disruptive protest
Safura Abdool Karim, Catherine Kruyer
Book review
Book review: Jane Duncan, The rise of the securocrats and Protest nation
Patrick Bond
Picture: ©Patrick King
