Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
by Carolyn on Apr 3rd, 2012
Environmental activist Patrick Bond attended the recent Time of the Writer Festival at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where he listened to Ronnie Kasrils speak about his biography of his late wife Eleanor, The Unlikely Secret Agent, which won the last year’s Alan Paton Award. Bond had a few of his own discussions with Kasrils and admits to having been so “charmed [by Kasrils] as to confess I will now blindly follow him on any madcap adventure”.
However, in the following article, Bond, who is the author of Durban’s Climate Gamble and Politics of Climate Justice, among other books, also looks critically at Kasrils involvement in the opening of the industrial waste-water recycling plant in South Durban, owned by the world’s largest water privatiser, Paris-based Vivendi:
‘I don’t have the stomach or the taste to serve any more at this level,’ said the normally ebullient Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils, as he quit after fourteen years of service to the South African government. It was late September 2008, just after Thabo Mbeki was palace-couped.
Kasrils’ intelligence service was by then an international laughingstock, with spy-versus-spy intrigue spilling out wide across the political landscape. His own troops were locked in unending, ungovernable, internecine battles against each other’s factions, using hoax emails, other disinformation and extraordinary political contortions unknown in even the ugliest Stalinist traditions of the African National Congress (ANC). Recall that Mbeki’s police chief Jackie Selebi was also the head of Interpol, and to have the mafia penetrate such high levels made South African security farcical at best.
Book details
Images courtesy Daily News and Mail & Guardian
» read article
by Sophy on Dec 7th, 2011
Special to Books LIVE by Sarah Frost:
Tying in with the environmentally significant 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17), taking place at the Durban International Convention Centre, last night Ike’s Books played host to the launch of five new titles relating to climate change: Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble by Patrick Bond, Earth Grab edited by Sylvia Gar, Nnimmo Bassey’s To Cook a Continent and African Awakening by Firoze Manji.
The verandah at Ike’s was crowded with Durban left-wing stalwarts as well as a number of international visitors. Patrick Bond, political economist and head of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, facilitated the event while also having two of his own works in the line up – Politics of Climate Justice, which he wrote while on sabbatical in Berkeley last year, and Durban’s Climate Gamble: Playing the Carbon Markets, Betting the Earth, a collection of essays of which he is the editor.
After speaking briefly about these two texts, Bond introduced Sylvia Gar from Uruguay, editor of Earth Grab: Geopiracy, the new Biomasters and Capturing Climate Genes. Gar expressed her concern that companies are “grabbing the earth” through new technologies and warned her audience that it is ‘much worse than we believe’.
Bond then invited Joel Covel, editor of prominent social journal Capital, Nature, Socialism and contributor to Durban’s Climate Gamble, to address the crowd. According to Covel, ‘we are delusional if we think COP 17 is going to make a difference in our economy’. He noted that, although he ‘rails against the psychopath polluters who make the big environmental choices,’ the real purpose of creating literature like this is to ‘go on and do what must be done which is to give this crisis the attention it deserves and break the cycle of exploitation.’ Covel argued that, although this particular collection celebrates Durban’s environmental struggles, an unprecedented revolution is necessary if we want to change the whole world.
Next up was renowned social activist, Ashwin Desai, one of the major contributors to Durban’s Climate Gamble, who offered many thought-provoking statements. He told activists in the audience that they have to be ‘serious about civil society as an antidote,’ questioning the NGOs that rely so much on funding that they forget how to organise. He said that, instead of ‘delivering a constituency to the ruling classes’, we should ‘f*ck them up’. In closing, Desai referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, warning that ‘civil society is not what it says it is’.
Last up was Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian grassroots activist and author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. Bassey emphasised his belief that Africa is not a lost cause, referring, in particular, to the on-the-ground activism of rural women who ‘will one day rise up and take their destiny’. He warned that, if polluting nations postpone curbing their emissions for another decade, Africa will ‘be evacuated of its citizens’. Bassey proposed that activists connect and learn from one another, forming a united front against so-called “Biomasters”. Each chapter of To Cook a Continent contains ‘snatches of poetry’, culminating in a poem he wrote about Shell’s extraction of oil in Nigeria: ‘we thought it was oil/ but it was blood’.
The launch of these books heralded a much-needed discussion around climate change in Africa, which one hopes will continue to remain in focus once COP17 concludes on Friday.
Facebook gallery
Book details
» read article
by Sophy on Nov 29th, 2011
UKZN Press, Unisa Press and Pambazuka Press invite you to the launch of a series of recently released titles related to the current COP17 Climate Change Conference. The launch, which takes place on 6 December at Ike’s Books, will celebrate the publication of two new titles by political economist Patrick Bond, Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble. Other titles being launched on the night include Pambazuka Press books Earth Grab, To Cook a Continent and African Awakening. Don’t miss this important event!
Event Details
- Date: Tuesday, 06 December 2011
- Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
- Venue: Ike’s Books and Collectables,
48a Florida Road
Durban | Map
- RSVP: Cedric Sissing,
cedric@adamsbooks.co.za,
031 303 9214; 082 873 2702
Book Details
Photo courtesy the Mail & Guardian
» read article
by Carolyn on Oct 5th, 2011
Uitspraak: wortel
Koos Malan se werk Politokrasie, met die subtitel “die dwanglogika van die territoriale staat”, verdien ’n wye leserspubliek onder Afrikaners in die besonder en Suid-Afrikaners in die algemeen.
Malan se sentrale argument is dat die staat, veral die territoriale en soewereine staat, soos ons dit vandag ken, nie ’n natuurlike nie, maar ’n historiese gegewe is. Met ander woorde die staat het nie altyd gelyk soos dit nou lyk nie en hoef ook nie in die toekoms so te lyk nie.
Boekbesonderhede
» read article
by Carolyn on Jul 14th, 2011
Siber Ink and Little White Bakkie are giving away 15 eBook copies of renowned environmental attorney Cormac Cullinan’s Wild Law: 2nd edition.
The eBook is available for purchase from the Little White Bakkie online store at the already tempting price of R99 (a hard copy in a retail store costs about R250), but now 15 lucky readers will have the chance to download the eBook for free!
Wild Law has played a seminal role in inspiring the global movement to recognise rights for Nature. In the book, Cullinan, who led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, dicusses how governance systems should change to address climate change.
To stand a chance to win a copy of the Wild Law ebook, for download from the Little White Bakkie store, follow these simple steps:
- Post a comment below this post on Siber Ink’s Facebook Wall, describing what you do to lead a more environmentally friendly lifestyle and reduce your carbon footprint. In what creative ways are you helping Mother Earth?
- Entrants will go into a draw to win an eBook
The competition closes on Tuesday, 16 August 2011.
Good luck!
Book details
by Sophy on May 11th, 2011
Verdict: carrot
The gacaca courts are a communal approach to transitional justice inspired by traditional Rwandan conflict resolution methods, yet employing these methods for far more significant crimes than previously fell under the purview of the pre-genocide incarnation of gacaca. Since 2001, the implementation of modern gacaca courts in the prosecution of genocide suspects has been widely scrutinised and frequently condemned.
The 11,000 local courts, with more than 250,000 community-elected gacaca judges, were set up in order to deal with three pragmatic objectives: processing and prosecuting the vast backlog of genocide cases, improving living conditions in the Rwandan prisons and fostering economic development.
Book Details
- The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers by Phil Clark
EAN: 9780521193481
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
» read article
by Tumi on Nov 4th, 2010
The Book Lounge invites you to the launch of Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames of a Life by John Saul.
In this book Canadian political philosopher John Saul draws on a series of his own occasional articles written over a span of forty years which, together with a linking narrative, serve to trace not only his own career as an anti-apartheid and liberation support movement activist in both Canada and southern Africa but also help recount the history of the various struggles in both places in which he has been directly involved. This memoir is capped by some longer summary pieces on the global processes of empire and decolonisation that he has witnessed and on the reading, listening, playing and family pleasures that have enlivened his life.
John Saul will be joined in conversation by Martin Legassick, author of The Politics of a South African Frontier.
Event Details
Also at the Book Lounge: The launch of The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda by Phil Clark.
Since 2001, the Gacaca community courts have been the centrepiece of Rwanda’s justice and reconciliation programme. Nearly every adult Rwandan has participated in the trials, principally by providing eyewitness testimony concerning genocide crimes. Lawyers are banned from any official involvement, an issue that has generated sustained criticism from human rights organisations and international scepticism regarding Gacaca’s efficacy. Drawing on more than six years of fieldwork in Rwanda and nearly five hundred interviews with participants in trials, this in-depth ethnographic investigation of a complex transitional justice institution explores the ways in which Rwandans interpret Gacaca. Its conclusions provide indispensable insight into post-genocide justice and reconciliation, as well as the population’s views on the future of Rwanda itself.
Event Details
Book Details
» read article
by Jani on Apr 28th, 2010
Verdict: unexpected stick
Albie Sachs served on the first Constitutional Court of South Africa. A lifelong member of the ANC and a political activist, he was forced into exile in the 1960s. Years later he was a victim of a car bomb planted by the South African Security Police that cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Although he practised as a barrister at the Cape Bar before going into exile and later had a distinguished academic career, his background marked him as a different kind of judge from his 10 colleagues on the Constitutional Court.
As he says in the prologue to his book: “I never took my being a judge as something natural, preordained and unproblematic. The intensely contradictory nature of my earlier relationship to the law would not have allowed this.”
Reviewing his record at the Constitutional Court, it is evident that Sachs brought a different perspective to the court. He wrote beautifully and his judgments often combined eloquence, compassion and an even rarer quality, legal imagination.
Book Details
» read article
by Jani on Feb 12th, 2010
Verdict: carrot
If you believe that the world is beset by a series of environmental problems that may well be fatal to civilisation, as it has commonly been understood, you may well be puzzled as to why the institutional responses to this crisis have, so far, been so ineffective. Some of the answers to that conundrum are provided in this interesting book.
Cormac Cullinan once practised law in the field of shipping and international commerce. At the same time, he is a former anti-apartheid activist. He now works as a partner in a specialist environmental law firm in Cape Town4 and also runs an environmental law and policy consultancy.
Book Details
» read article
by Sophy on Nov 6th, 2009
With the hugely-anticipated United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Copenhagen in December this year – a conference that has become the subject of hopes and fears of literally millions – hot talk around global warming is increasingly bubbling up (to mix a metaphor or three).
This past Sunday, five big eco articles appeared in the SA papers – three in the Sunday Independent alone. When the media move in concert on an issue it’s always a sight to behold. BOOK SA certainly noticed, and, in case you missed it, we present the stories here. Go on, get inside the greenhouse and get to know the issues:
Here is the good news on the climate front: the Europeans have ratcheted down their emissions targets, the Chinese are getting serious about solar power and energy efficiency, and Washington is lumbering towards a carbon cap.
These are steps towards the long-held goal: cutting global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. Such cuts would stabilise the thickness of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide blanket surrounding the planet at 450 parts per million (ppm) and, we’ve been told, ensure that the global average temperature increase would not exceed 2186C from 1990 levels.
At last, the wreck of the rainforests is being tackled. One of the key parts of the Copenhagen climate agreement which the international community will try to construct in December is a comprehensive treaty aiming to reduce deforestation rates in the developing countries by at least 50 percent by 2020.
Not before time. It has been 20 years since we woke up to the reality of large-scale rainforest loss: in the late 1980s, the terrible scale of destruction in regions such as the Brazilian Amazon, and later, in Indonesia and other areas, dawned on the world, but in the time since then, all we have been able to do, in effect, has been to wring our hands.
We’re going to drown in information about climate change in the prelude and aftermath of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.
In SA, most of the information we’ll likely receive will state as incontrovertible fact that our planet’s temperatures are on the rise and humans are responsible for this. Climate change scepticism doesn’t get much press here.
In what would be the largest habitat zone established in the US to protect a species from extinction, the federal government has proposed designating 519 398 square kilometres on the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears.
Officials said the designation is not likely to further slow the pace of oil and gas development, and it crucially would not impose any controls to slow the biggest threat to polar bears, the melting of sea ice as a result of climate change.
Illness will affect productivity and employment, which could slash the GDP.
Our country is reliant on our natural resources and wildlife to attract tourists, so loss of habitats and biodiversity will negatively affect the economy.
A study by the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies and USAid, estimates that climate change will put about 3% of our GDP at risk.
Book details
Image courtesy Copenhagen Climate Agreement Blog
» read article
Apr
