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File image: People cross a street flooded by sewage, ahead of local government elections in Soweto’s Kliptown, South Africa, October 27, 2021.
The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has again flagged the poor delivery of basic services in various areas of the country as a serious violation of rights.
This as South Africa joins the international community in marking International Human Rights Day.
The SAHRC says that the state’s failure to provide basics like water, sanitation, health and education strips citizens of dignity.
Human Rights lawyer Mametlwe Sebei says South Africa faces some of the most pressing human rights issues.
“Human rights is about access to housing, food, water and some of the most fundamental pursuits that were at the core of our own struggle against apartheid, and at the core of our continuous struggles for service delivery, justice at work, fair labour standards and a quality of living for everybody. We can see that the past 30 years has been nothing short of the catastrophic failure to realise the most modest and basics of the fundamental human rights,” says Sebei.
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Meanwhile, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says the world is in a state of profound distress. The UN agency’s statement comes on International Human Rights Day.
This year’s theme centres around “Our Everyday Essentials – to show how human rights shape our daily lives”.
The day is being marked amid contraventions of international law, including allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity.
UNHCR representative in South Africa, Abigail Noko, highlights the importance of human rights, saying the reason why it is being commemorated is because it is the day when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948.
“The theme for the campaign this year is ‘Human Rights Are Everyday Essentials’. And the reason for that is really trying to conjure this idea that we need to go back to basics, that we need to appreciate that human rights are not abstract ideas, they really inform what all of us live for and live by on a daily basis,” says Noko.
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