How SA country living became a nightmare for Canadian journalist
Country living is a dream for many city people, but as Canadian journalist Douglas Mason has discovered, it may easily become a nightmare. On his way to Afghanistan some years ago, he spent Christmas Eve at a guest farm in the middle of the Free State. One thing led...
Al-Bashir judgment: what the court actually said
NO doubt about it, the government has sustained a serious moral and legal setback with today’s judgment from the Supreme Court of Appeal slamming Pretoria’s failure to arrest and hand over Sudan’s President Al Bashir to the International Criminal Court when he visited...
Do SA’s artists need legal help?
IMAGINE this picture: the President of South Africa announces the names of a new crop of judges he has just appointed. Not unusual, you might say. But suppose this is the first the public has heard about the appointments. Suppose the open hearings, required by law,...
Selling property? – read this, it could literally save you a fortune
IF there’s just one legal story you remember this year, let it be this one: It’s the story of a taxpayer (who was not named in the court’s judgment) and what started off as a conventional property sale attracting capital gains tax. Five years later however the sale...
Judge stuns with admission: “In this case the law is an ass”
EVER heard a judge say, in so many words, that the law being applied in a case is an ass? Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Compass v Van Tonder, in which Judge Anton Steenkamp says not only that the law applicable to the case was an ass – but goes on to add...
Carmel’s writing is back on this site
It’s six months since my last column for the Independent Group and I would like to thank everyone who wrote and called to wish me well and to say how much they had enjoyed my weekly pieces over many years in the group’s morning titles. Your encouragement and support...
Take sex abuse of girls seriously, Zim judge chides her judicial colleagues
A NEWLY-appointed Zimbabwe judge has laid it on the line for her judicial colleagues: she said it was high time they handed down tougher sentences, with penalties indicating that sex with girls under 18 is always illegal and has serious consequences. Judge Jester...
The covert consultant and the “invisible” theft
A FRIEND told me a story the other day I hardly believed. Working in his father’s industrial workshop he noticed a man in a car parked on the verge outside. From early morning he photographed everyone arriving at the factory across the road, all the trucks coming and...
Defamation and the stain of plagiarism: a lesson for academia
ONE minute Theuns Pelser was a respected member of staff at the University of the North-West, director of the graduate school of business and government leadership and a thesis supervisor in much demand. Next moment an email arrived in his in-box and changed his life...
Millions affected by top court’s new decision
IT’S not often you read judgments that you know could change literally millions of lives. Yet this month the courts delivered not one, but two, such decisions. As the driving force in one of the cases, Bridgman Sojane of the platinum-rich Pilanesburg area in North...