South Africa: The Role of the Courts in Realizing Rights to Health and Housing1 Context

1. When Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1992, the new Constitution, adopted in 1996, included a comprehensive list of civil, political, social, cultural, and economic rights. The Constitution specifically recognizes the rights to housing and health care, including reproductive heath care, and imposes an obligation on the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within available resources, to progressively realize those rights. It also recognizes the interdependence, indivisibly, and interrelatedness of rights, and protects a range of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights that are directly or indirectly related to housing and health rights. The comprehensive protection of housing rights is particularly important in the South African context, where the right to housing is so closely linked to the right of access to land, and dispossession of land was a key feature of the creation of the Apartheid state. More broadly, the Constitution also provides for public engagement in social and economic policies, and facilitates public involvement in the lawmaking process and in oversight of policy implementation