Suchergebnisse

Achieving environmental justice in South Africa is critically important, not only because of historical reasons rooted in the country's apartheid past, but also to ensure that everyone in the country, especially marginalized and vulnerable sectors of society, are properly protected from disproportional environmental impacts. Another aim of environmental justice in South Africa is to ensure that everyone equally shares in the benefits of the country's resources. In this article, we interrogate ways through which to achieve environmental justice in South Africa through the use of civil-based instruments (CBIs) of environmental governance. The central hypothesis is that CBIs are particularly well-suited to contribute to the achievement of environmental justice since they are essentially instruments which empower civil society to become central stakeholders in environmental governance by fostering active participation in the decisions that may impact on the environment and people's health and well-being. Through these instruments all of society, particularly disenfranchised people suffering most from environmental injustice, are afforded a platform to pursue their environment-related interests that may be affected by the decisions taken by government and private actors such as polluting companies. For the purpose of the discussion we focus specifically on public participation, access to information and access to justice, all of which are generally accepted as CBIs, including in international law.

South Africa has come a long way since the constitutional revolution that swept the country in the early 1990s. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 introduced and continues to drive far-reaching changes to the political, social and juridical landscape and it aims to create a more just and equal society for all; one where respect for human rights is paramount. On 16 August 2012 the country was rocked to its core when the South African Police Service killed 34 striking miners at Lonmin Plc's platinum mine at Marikana in the country's North-West Province in what appeared to be a brutal suppression of one of the most significant labour unrests in the country's history. Evoking images of apartheid-era police brutality, the "Marikana massacre" has unearthed some of the many challenges the country is struggling with on its long road to creating a just society for all. The predominant focus of political and juridical commentary on and scholarly critique of the incident has to date focused on labour and social justice issues. In this article we focus on the often ignored, albeit equally critical, deleterious socio-economic and related environmental impacts of mining in South Africa by exploring the intimate link between slow violence and the broader environmental justice movement within the South African context through the lens of the Marikana massacre. In pursuit of this objective, the article commences with a brief overview of the actors involved in the Marikana massacre. The following part seeks to understand environmental justice and slow violence in relation to the massacre. We then demonstrate how the South African mining industry, backed as it was by government, has been highly exploitative of workers and natural resources, and how successive post-apartheid governments have been and continue to be complicit in environmental injustice and slow violence against marginalised black people in South Africa. In view of the consequences of this historical legacy, in the final part of the article, we provide some critical observations within the framework of environmental justice and slow violence.

Juridical protection of the rights of nature is steadily emerging in several legal systems and in public discourse. Building on a recent publication in Transnational Environmental Law (TEL) wherein we interrogated Ecuador's constitutional experiment with the rights of nature, we critically reflect in this contribution on Bolivia's legal regime providing for the rights of Mother Earth. We do so first by sketching the juridical-political context within which these statutes were drafted and adopted and then by analyzing the relevant constitutional provisions that provide the basis for the laws of Mother Earth. The third part forms the bulk of the discussion and details the background and the most relevant provisions of Bolivian statutes with a view to enabling a deeper critique in Part Four, where we critically evaluate both the symbolic and the theoretical significance of the statutes as well as concerns related to their practical implementation. Insofar as the rights of nature paradigm has now become a truly global debate and a consideration in transnational comparative legal borrowing practices, our analysis aims to reveal the Bolivian experience which could be instructive to civil society groups, academics, politicians and legislatures in a transnational setting.