Edition March 2026

As we launch our annual Human Rights Month, we do so in the year that we celebrate two very significant events whose occurrence, amongst others, brought us the human rights we enjoy today –  the 70th anniversary of the 1956 women’s march to the Union Buildings and the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 . 

One was courageous challenge to the oppressive apartheid regime to concede to the demands by women for their basic human rights and the other was to mark the victory of many years of struggle against colonisation and oppression. Because of the adoption of the Constitution 30 years ago, we now have a foundation upon which we can strive towards the common vision for unity in diversity, while strengthening the culture of respect for human rights and the rule of law in South Africa.

The Constitution making process was one of the most inclusive processes in modern times. The inclusivity of the process is best described by Justice Albi Sachs when he said the following about the constitution: “We wanted a constitution that was smiling to the people – but it must not be a sneer smile, or an insincere mask of a smile. The smile must come from inside, that people may believe in it, because it is authentic. And the smile contains tears, and sadness, and a knowledge of imperfection”.

The Constitution is a testament that wise men and women of all races, religions and diverse cultural freely came together to weave a new nation in a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it; black and white. 

While the years that followed the adoption have been neither seamless nor without contradiction, the constitutional project that was set in motion then has, over 30 years, reshaped the political, legal and social construction of this country in ways that deserve both serious reflection and, where warranted, genuine acknowledgment. 

Background

To appreciate the magnitude of what the Constitution represented, one must first reckon with what preceded it. For over three centuries, colonialism and then apartheid did not merely discriminate, it institutionalised and systematised human degradation, and in particular of the black South African majority. Both colonial and apartheid regimes implanted racial hierarchy into the fabric of law itself, so that the very institutions that ought to have protected citizens became instruments of oppression. Justice was not blind; it was deliberately sighted, and it saw race.

What the negotiated transition of the early 1990s accomplished, therefore, was not merely a political handover but a civilisational reorientation. The Interim Constitution of 1993 described the moment as a "historic bridge" as it symbolised a passage from strife and injustice to peaceful coexistence premised on open democratic governance and the pursuit of universal human rights. That bridge led, in 1996, to the final Constitution, a document that did not simply list rights but rooted them as the supreme law of the land, binding the executive, the legislature and the judiciary alike. 

Critically, the Constitution was never designed to be a static settlement. From its inception, it was conceived as a living framework, one capable of responding to an ever-changing legal, social, and political context. As reflected by the Reconstruction and Development Programme's insistence on integrated, people-driven, sustainable development, the Constitution built into its very structure the expectation that the work of transformation would be ongoing, that rights would be progressively realised, and that the institutions of justice would continue to evolve in response to the demands placed upon them. 

Equal rights for all 

The past 30 years, examined honestly, reveal that the Constitution has done much of what it promised, even as implementation has too often fallen short of aspiration. Perhaps the most consequential achievement has been the structural integration of the justice system itself.

What this record reveals, taken together, is that the constitutional framework was not static. It was built to grow from its very foundation and ultimately respond to the shifting demands of justice, the evolution of rights, and to the changing context of a society still working through the inherited inequalities that the Constitution was designed to dismantle. That is a significant claim, and like all significant claims, it must be tested against the evidence. 

The evidence for what the Constitution has delivered to the justice system, is on its own terms, substantial. Where once there were eleven disparate departments, there is now a unified framework. The Superior Courts Act 10, 2013 (Act 10 of 2013) rationalised the court hierarchy, bringing coherence to a system that had been deliberately fractured under apartheid. The Constitution Seventeenth Amendment Act of 2012 affirmed the Constitutional Court's apex status in all matters, affirming its role as the final arbiter of the Republic's supreme law. These reforms are, in themselves, expressions of the principle that no legislative or executive action, regardless of its political weight, sits beyond the reach of judicial scrutiny. That is the foundation on which the rule of law, in any meaningful sense, depends.

Equally significant has been the expansion of access to justice, and the direction of that expansion is as important as its scope. The Traditional Courts Act, 2022 (Act 9 of 2022) represents a considered effort to align customary dispute resolution with constitutional values, sweeping away the last remnants of the Black Administration Act, 1927 (Act 38 of 1927), a statute whose continued existence within a democratic dispensation had long been an anomaly that the constitutional framework could not indefinitely accommodate. 

The Land Court Act, 2023 (Act 6 of 2023) likewise created a dedicated forum for the resolution of land disputes, a matter of no small consequence in a country whose land history remains one of its most contested and emotionally charged inheritances. These developments are significant because access to justice is a substantive constitutional obligation, one that extends beyond the mere existence of courts to encompass whether those courts are practically accessible, procedurally comprehensible, and institutionally equipped to serve those who have historically been furthest from them.

The Bill of Rights

If the justice system provides one category of proof, the advancement of human rights provides another, and it is here that the Constitution's responsiveness is perhaps most vividly demonstrated. 

At the nub of the constitutional dispensation lies the Bill of Rights. Chapter 2 does something ambitious that, thirty years on, still deserves appreciation, specifically in that it refuses to treat civil and political rights as somehow more real or more pressing than socio-economic rights. 

The right to equality, to human dignity, to privacy, and to freedom of expression are articulated alongside the rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, and education. These rights are far beyond aspirational ornaments; they are justiciable entitlements, enforceable in courts of law

What makes their entrenchment particularly significant is that it does not freeze them in time. 

The Constitution's interpretive framework obliges courts to develop the content of rights in a manner that responds to present-day circumstances and evolving understandings of human dignity. 

Legislation giving effect to this vision has progressively extended the Constitution's reach into the everyday encounters citizens have with government, addressing unfair discrimination, protecting access to information, and insisting on transparency, lawfulness, and reasonableness as conditions of legitimate administrative action.

Areas to improve 

What the record of these thirty years also reveals, however, is that the communities that bore the heaviest cost of apartheid's deliberate impoverishment have not experienced the pace of transformation that the Constitution's provisions reasonably implied. 

Those who were systematically denied access to property, education, and the basic conditions of a dignified life have found that, while the legal order has been fundamentally recast, their material circumstances have not shifted with commensurate decisiveness. 

Corruption, persistent resource constraints, and uneven implementation have each, in different measure, drawn the pace of delivery away from what the legal framework envisioned.

The consequence is a constitutional democracy in which the law has advanced with considerably greater speed and clarity than the material reality it was expressly designed to transform, not because the framework is wanting, but because the administrative and financial conditions necessary to give it full effect have not been consistently sustained.

This is the central tension that three decades of constitutional democracy has not yet resolved. The framework has proven its durability, in the courts, the legislature, and in the institutions created to give it effect. 

What has not kept pace is the translation of that framework into the daily lives of those it was most urgently intended to serve. That remains the most consequential measure by which this constitutional project will continue to be assessed.. 

*This message is part of a speech delivered by Minister Kubayi at the launch of the 30-Year Anniversary of the Constitution and Human Rights Month.