Carmel Rickard, Author at Carmel Rickard writes...

Repressive policing law: scathing judgment by Uganda’s constitutional court

2 April 2020
by Carmel Rickard

One of Uganda’s most contentious laws has come under fire by that country’s constitutional court. A particularly repressive section giving the police power to prohibit all public gatherings and protest has been declared unconstitutional and the court’s majority took the opportunity to criticise the way police hound and harass any political gathering not called by the ruling party.

Read judgment

The majority judgment of Uganda’s constitutional court in this challenge to the law that inhibited the right to gather and protest, reads like the stirring highpoint of some movie legal drama.

Uncategorised

Sentencing pregnant women in Malawi – judge lays down the law

2 April 20202 April 2020
by Carmel Rickard

The case of a heavily pregnant woman accused of stealing from other women at a shopping centre has given one of Malawi’s judges the chance to re-state the law on sentencing first offenders and those who are pregnant. The judge quoted international law on the subject, as well as Malawi’s own legislation and prison inspection reports, some of which she had written herself. She pointed out that the country’s prisons did not have proper health care facilities for dealing with pregnant women or infants and that the infant and maternal mortality rates in prison were a matter of concern.

Thumbs down from Constitutional Court for COVID-19 lockdown challenge

30 March 202030 March 2020
by Carmel Rickard

No surprises here: the constitutional court, South Africa’s highest judicial forum, has refused an urgent application for direct access from a group that wanted to argue that the COVID-19 lockdown was unlawful. It claimed the virus would not seriously affect SA because African people would ‘self-heal’ from the disease.

Read HBR Foundation Court ruling

The Hola Bon Renaissance Foundation really had no chance that this application would fly. The shoddy legal papers filed last week, the wild claims on which the application was based, the fact that it (once again) gave no reason for why it should be allowed to start at the top, as it were, rather than taking the case through the normal court system – all of this, put together, meant the bizarre petition was never going to make it.

Uncategorised

‘No disaster; no grounds for lockdown’ – bizarre new case launched at Constitutional Court

29 March 202030 March 2020
by Carmel Rickard

The Hola Bon Renaissance Foundation has launched an application to the Constitutional Court, the highest judicial forum in South Africa. It is asking for direct access to the court so that it may argue that the current lockdown is unconstitutional and unlawful. The HBRF claims that there is no emergency situation in SA and that COVID-19 is a ‘self-healing disease for Africans’.

Read founding affidavit: HBR Foundation vs President of Republic Of SA ConCourt.pdf

The Hola Bon Renaissance Foundation may be obscure, boasting an ageing FB site with not a single posting, for example, but it is no stranger to the Constitutional Court. Nor is this the first time it has asked for direct access to that court to present a bizarre legal argument.

Uncategorised

‘Tragic’ coronavirus case: court says it cannot allow man to attend grandfather’s funeral

28 March 202029 March 2020
by Carmel Rickard

A man whose grandfather was burnt to death in a fire on Friday has been refused permission to travel from his home in Mpumalanga to attend the funeral in the Eastern Cape. The man, Karel van Heerden, brought an urgent application in the high court’s Mpumalanga division on Friday afternoon, seeking a special exemption from the coronavirus lockdown regulations now in force that bar crossing provincial boundaries. The three-week lockdown has been imposed to help slow the spread of the virus.

Repressive policing law: scathing judgment by Uganda’s constitutional court

Share this:

Sentencing pregnant women in Malawi – judge lays down the law

Share this:

Thumbs down from Constitutional Court for COVID-19 lockdown challenge

Share this:

‘No disaster; no grounds for lockdown’ – bizarre new case launched at Constitutional Court

Share this:

‘Tragic’ coronavirus case: court says it cannot allow man to attend grandfather’s funeral

Share this: