Land Conference
The Failed Promise of Tenure Security - Customary Land Rights and Dispossession.
Register now for the Land Conference that will take place from 17-19 August 2022: bit.ly/landconf22
Section 25(6) of the Constitution promises tenure security as one of the three components of land reform, the others being restitution and redistribution. Section 25(9) enjoins Parliament to enact legislation to give effect to the right to tenure security. Twenty-five years after the Constitution was adopted the 18 million South Africans living in the former homelands have limited recognition of their tenure security. Instead, their customary and informal land rights are directly and systematically under threat from government laws, policies and practices that abrogate these rights. This conference seeks to inform and enrich the public and academic discourse about land tenure rights, ongoing threats to these rights, and the urgent need for state intervention to protect and enhance land tenure security in line with the Constitution. It seeks to engage with and contribute to strategies and practices concerning community mobilisation and litigation approaches that seek to protect and enhance tenure security in the former homelands.
The subject matter of the conference will address a number of themes:
• Theme 1 Documenting and exposing the scale, nature and impact of current threats to tenure security.
• Theme 2 Examining the place of customary law in the constitutional era and the interface between customary and common law land rights and constructs of ownership in the context of the tenure security promised by section 25(6) of the Constitution.
• Theme 3 Providing and examining past and current evidence of the content and nature of customary land rights to ensure that they are legible and respected within the dominant paradigm of common and statutory law in South Africa.
• Theme 4 Will examine mobilisation, policy and/or litigation strategies in respect of ○ protecting existing rights from current threats. ○ the proactive development of policies, practices and laws that give effect to sections 25(6) and (9) of the Constitution. Considering experiences, responses, and alternatives developed in other jurisdictions - including examples from the African continent and examples from South America.
