Thousands of South Africa's poorest people face eviction from inner-city suburbs across the country ahead of the 2010 World Cup football.The country's Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) recently allowed Johannesburg City, which has two world-cup stadiums, to evict 300 squatters from inner-city buildings classified as unsafe by the Johannesburg municipality.
Johannesburg has evicted thousands of the country's poorest people from 125 buildings since the 2001 launch of its urban renewal plan for 235 buildings on its list of 'bad buildings', mainly hotel and apartment block construction and refurbishment.
The eviction process was forced to cease after a High Court decision in favour of the squatters in March 2006, when their legal team successfully argued that eviction would make their clients homeless because there was no clear strategy to provide them with adequate alternate accommodation. However, the city council appealed the High Court decision.
Last month, Appeals Judge Louis Harms ruled that the city's notice for the squatters to vacate the derelict apartment block and residential buildings in the inner-city suburb of Berea, on the grounds of fire and health hazards, to be neither unconstitutional nor otherwise unlawful.
"Moreover, the obligation of the occupiers to comply with that order is not dependent upon their being provided with alternative accommodation, even if the effect of complying with the order will be that they are left without access to adequate housing," the judgment read. The SCA also ordered the city to offer those evicted relocation to a temporary settlement area.
Stuart Wilson of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University said there were concerns that the judgment did not go far enough in protecting the occupiers of so-called 'bad buildings' in inner-city Johannesburg from the arbitrary exercise of state power.
"The court record shows that the inner-city poor are routinely marginalised by the City of Johannesburg and denied an adequate hearing by the city's officials before decisions to evict are taken. The judgment appears to condone this practice, and effectively leaves it to the city to decide if and when the occupiers of bad buildings should be consulted prior to future
eviction applications," he commented.
"I do not understand how the SCA can require alternative shelter to be provided to the most desperate, but not require that residents of all bad buildings be consulted in order to find out whether or not they are desperate," Wilson added.
Evictions have resumed since the ruling: more than 100 refugees and asylum seekers were evicted on 28 March from the Coronia Gardens building in Johannesburg's city centre, where they had lived for years, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.
Published with the permission of IRIN
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