The Legal Assistance Trust

In 1996, South Africa celebrated the adoption of its final Constitution together with a Bill of Rights which obliges the government to do as much as it can to secure a basic set of public services that comprise people’s social and economic rights. These include:

• Access to sufficient food and water
• Social security
• Basic nutrition
• Shelter and adequate housing
• Health care and social services for children
• Education
• An environment that is not harmful to health or wellbeing
• A health care service
• Land on an equitable basis

Yet South Africa faces ongoing political, social and economic challenges and pervasive inequality with over 22 million people living below the poverty line. These social and economic challenges include: changing political dynamics, ineffectual leadership, increases in corruption and overprotection of officials. There is also uneven government capability to deliver on the required transformations such as municipal services, rampant unemployment, an increasing crime statistic and a fragile donor-dependent civil society.

The LRC uses its legal and negotiating skills to tackle the inequalities and injustices of civil society and as those struggles progress, the nature of its work changes in line with the challenges facing society.

The Focus of their work includes the following:

• Law reform and rural development (communal property rights, tenure security, customary rights & their impact on women)
• Social Services (access to State grants, workmen’s compensation, refugees, healthcare)
• Housing and local government (evictions, rental, low cost housing, informal sector access and local government services)
• Environmental Justice (air quality, pesticides, waste management and the impact of mining)

• Women’s rights (maintenance, shelters for abused women, gender based violence and domestic abuse)
• Children’s rights (orphans and vulnerable children, justice system failures, guardians’ fund obligations, and state support failures)
• HIV/AIDS (monitoring of government structures, social grants, home based care interventions, extension of ARV treatments, victims of violence and rape, discrimination against sufferers)

The LRC finds that whilst most of the projects have specific focus areas, the critical issues such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, disabilities and the problems women and children experience overlap into other focus areas.

Visit the Legal Resources Centre Website