Jurisprudential Analysis of the Right to Life and Dignity: A South African Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyse the jurisprudence of the right to life and dignity as fundamentally protected rights in a South African perspective since the dawn of democracy and Constitution of 1996 hereafter referred to as the Constitution. This paper argues that South Africa as a state in applying the Bill of Rights and the Constitution might have encroached or applied laws that may have compromised justice in so far as the impact from the decisions of the courts are concerned. This paper will therefore examine how the courts have interpreted the law and the protection of the non derogable rights of life and dignity post constitutional democracy. The democratic government has a duty to reverse apartheid policies that stemmed from colonial laws. Apartheid laws segregated people and rights were clustered, and selectively applied along racial lines with a tiny majority of European-Africans as sole beneficiaries of rights while the African majority wallow in rightlessness. The authors will examine how the state interprets these fundamental principles of the constitution since the dawn of democracy. The authors hope that the arguments presented in this paper would assist in understanding the moral justification of the decisions in human rights cases in South Africa as the courts battle their way into the realisation of especially non derogable rights as set out in the Bill of Rights.