The Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa is seeking an order against the executive mayor of eThekwini (Durban), together with two other senior officials in their personal capacities, to take all the steps necessary to implement a court order requiring housing to be provided to 37 occupants of the Richmond Farm Transit Camp in KwaMashu. The occupiers were evicted from the Siyanda informal settlement in March 2009 in order to allow the construction of a road. One of the conditions of the eviction order was that the occupiers would be provided with permanent housing within a year. The deadline for doing so expired almost two years ago and nothing has been done to comply with the order. This case, if argued, will be important because it will establish whether individual office bearers can be held personally responsible for the state’s failure to perform on specific obligations.

Government has moved one step further towards the establishment of the massive National Health Insurance scheme for South Africa, with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan today announcing an allocation of R1 billion to the scheme's pilot projects. The money comes from the R121 billion health budget which aims to improve hospital infrastructure and strengthen the public health system ahead of the introduction of the NHI, which will be phased in over a period of 14 years, starting this year.

South Africa served as a transit point for a shipment of crowd-control weapons to Madagascar's former president, a Johannesburg-based newspaper reported. The Sunday Independent cited a cable from the United States embassy in Antananarivo saying Chinese-made riot control equipment - including grenades, rubber bullets and teargas - were unloaded in South Africa and then collected by then-president Marc Ravalomanana's private jet.

Out of a population of 49-million, 7.5-million South Africans are out of work. Young people are worst affected, with over half of 18- to 25-year-olds unemployed. According to the labour federation, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), there's no other middle income country in the world with such a high rate of unemployment. 'This is a crisis. We call it a ticking bomb,' said Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu's general secretary.

New laws governing traditional courts could strip 22-million rural South Africans - and women in particular - of some of their most basic rights. The Traditional Courts Bill, on which public comment closed this week, aims to set a framework whereby customary courts will have legal clout. Civic organisations have slammed it as being unconstitutional, but traditional leaders argue that the Bill has been grossly misinterpreted by civil society.

A miner was killed in clashes with police at the strike-hit Impala Platinum mine in South Africa, the second death since violence broke out last week, police said on Monday 20 February. 'One miner was found dead with live ammunition in his body, and another was injured with live ammunition,' police spokesman Brigadier Thulani Ngubane told Sapa news agency. Production at Impala, the world's number two platinum producer, has been hobbled since January 20, when some workers began a strike that was declared illegal by a court. That allowed the company to sack workers who did not return to the job, with more than 17,000 people fired. One week ago, Implats agreed to re-hire workers, but the deal failed to address the root cause of the strike - discontent that some categories of workers had been awarded bonuses while others were left out.

'We all know that the provision of housing in Durban has been taken over by corrupt politicians and their friends to make them rich while hundreds of thousands of people in this city continue to live in shacks facing fires, floods, rats and evictions. In Shallcross there are shack dwellers who occupied neglected RDP houses which were built over 2 years ago and then left uncompleted. The residents who have been waiting for more than 17 years for the houses promised to them decided to occupy these houses, including an old granny in her 80 years who lives with her grand children, after a heavy wind had destroyed their shacks last year. Another reason for these occupations has been that the housing officials have allegedly sold some of these houses to people from outside the area including those who do not qualify for the RDP houses such as teachers, nurses and police officers.'

In South Africa, policy with respect to HIV/AIDS has had a strong rights-based framing in line with international trends and in keeping with the constitutional overhaul in the post-Apartheid era. Since HIV in this setting has heavily affected women of reproductive age, there has been discussion about the particular needs of this subgroup, especially in the context of service integration. This paper is concerned with the way in which HIV positive women conceptualise these rights and whether they wish and are able to actualise them in their daily lives.

An alleged police hit squad exposed by the Sunday Times is being investigated for at least 51 suspicious murders - including one in its offices and another in its toilets. The body count is higher than initially thought - and 18 KwaZulu-Natal police officers are now suspects. They include two from the National Intervention Unit and 16 from the notorious Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit. The Sunday Times initially investigated seven cases involving the Cato Manor unit and 16 suspicious deaths.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder is trying to rewrite history and suggest that settlers and colonialists found South Africa as a 'house to let', the Young Communist League of South Africa said on Sunday. 'The fact is that land was dispossessed violently and through bloodshed, and ultimately legislated in 1913, leaving Africans with no choice but to subject themselves to wage exploitation in the mining industry,' league secretary Buti Manamela said in a statement on its lekgotla.

Nearly everything President Zuma and the big corporates are doing places short-term demands above long-term thinking, both in the marketplace and at the polling place, promoting unfairness and exclusion, and thus preventing lasting prosperity and stability.

Thousands of protesting miners burnt tyres and torched a police office near Impala Platinum's Rustenburg mine in South Africa on Thursday 16 February as a month-long strike at the world's second-largest producer of the precious metal turned violent. Police also said a miner who was beaten up during an overnight demonstration near the Rustenburg plant had died of his injuries.

Was the ANC’s decision disciplining or silencing the ANC Youth League? asks Zama Ndlovu on the Mail and Guardian blog Thought Leader. 'Before Julius Malema entered the political scene, there was very little public discourse on the acute socio-economic issues faced by a growing number of young South Africans today. After 18 years of political freedom, more than half of South Africans under the age of 25 remain unemployed – among the highest jobless rates in the world.'

Four months ago, Clemence Uzizo, 21, a welder living in Soweto, Johannesburg's most populous suburb, made the mistake of venturing out to a local shop without his asylum-seeker permit. Neither the police who arrested him, nor the immigration officials who detained him, verified Uzizo's legal status before deporting him to Zimbabwe, the country of his birth. 'My permit was at home but I didn't have a cell phone to call to ask someone to bring it,' he told IRIN not long after making a risky and expensive return to South Africa via the Limpopo River. 'Since my father brought me [to South Africa] in 1992 I've lived here, so I don't know anyone in Zimbabwe.'

A post on the Free Gender blog explains how in a meeting between LGBTI activists and church leaders, their sexuality was referred to as 'a thing'. 'Some left the boardroom with so many unanswered questions as they felt that conversation had a lot to do with dictatorship instead of opening up a holy and safe space for proper discussion that will make LGBTI feel welcomed at churches regardless of one’s sexuality or gender expression.'

Findings of a recent survey do not provide evidence for mass-immigration of foreign sex workers advertising online and in local newspapers, nor a spike in sex work or risk of HIV transmission during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. 'Public health programmes focusing on sex work and HIV prevention during international sporting events should be based on evidence, not media-driven sensationalism that further heightens discrimination against sex workers and increases their vulnerability.'

A woman was killed and 10 people were arrested during service delivery protests in Masoyi, south of Hazyview, Mpumalanga police said. The woman was killed after a truck accidentally reversed into her on a road barricaded by protesters, Sergeant Gerald Sedibe said.

South Africa is to build a R1,6bn pharmaceutical plant to produce the ingredients for antiretroviral medicines, used in the treatment of HIV and Aids, government announced. Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said South Africa consumed R25bn-worth of medicines each year, the 'majority' of this imported.

Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president, has revealed an ambitious set of infrastructure projects designed to rescue South Africa from the effects of a global recession that has hit the nation harder than most on the continent. 'We have chosen five major geographically-focused programmes, as well as projects focusing on health and basic education infrastructure, information and communication technologies and regional integration,' Zuma said in his annual televised state of the nation address to parliament in Cape Town. Zuma's focus on infrastructure development was applauded by opposition politicians, but they questioned whether he could or would follow through on his pledges.

The Goethe-Institut, in co-operation with the Cape Town Book Fair and APNET, is once again offering an invitation programme for publishers from sub-Saharan African countries. The aim of this initiative is to support the participation of publishing houses from sub-Saharan African countries at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012 and to provide training and networking opportunities for publishers from this region. The grant comprises of travel costs to Cape Town, participation in a workshop on 14 June 2012, a small stand at the Cape Town Book Fair (15 – 17 June 2012) and accommodation during the workshop and the Book Fair. Costs for the transportation of books and other materials to be exhibited are not covered.