Justin Pearce
A schoolteacher seeking paternity leave, a group of prisoners claiming to have been assaulted and a schoolboy defending his right to have long hair are among the stories told inside the cardboard folders stacked on the desk of Human Rights Commission (HRC) member Pansy Tlakula.
Upstairs in the stately Houghton office suite occupied by the commission, the chairs are empty but the in-trays are already overflowing. Hundreds more files await the attention of the HRC’s legal department once its staff assume their posts in August.
Nine months after the inaugural meeting of the HRC, the commission is still ploughing through the red tape involved in approving civil service appointments. It took six months for the commission to move into permanent offices, and even longer to connect the phones.
The HRC may lack the public profile enjoyed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, yet the inquiries have come in faster than the wheels of bureaucracy have turned.
“I was finding myself driven by complaints and not able to do anything,” Tlakula recalls. Since then, the HRC has concentrated on the urgent cases while it waits for its staff to arrive — an early success was when the commission mediated the racial conflict over Ho`rskool Vryburg.
Another emergency case involved a complaint from inmates at Krugersdorp prison, who said they had been assaulted by racist warders.
While the allegations are being investigated, the HRC obtained an undertaking that the prisoners who laid the complaint would not be victimised by being moved to another prison as has happened in similar cases.
“Prisoners have all that time to write letters,” Tlakula remarks with a wry smile, but she and her colleagues are taking the issue seriously. The volume of letters from prisoners — 80% of them alleging racism, according to Tlakula — has prompted the HRC to launch a national inquiry into prison abuses rather than follow the intricacies of each case.
Similarly, the HRC puts a high priority on cases that will set precedents. Among them is the case of a Western Cape schoolteacher who applied for paternity leave since his self-employed wife could not leave her business after the birth of their child. Denied leave by the provincial education department, the teacher approached the HRC on the grounds that the department’s policy of granting parenting leave only to mothers was discriminatory.
Tlakula speaks with equal patience, though less passion, about the boy from the North West who complained that his school principal’s insistence that he get a haircut was an infringement of his rights.
“We talked to him and tried to persuade him he was in matric and next year he could grow his hair as long as he liked.”
Talking and persuading are to take much of the HRC’s time as the commission’s work gets under way — Tlakula explains the intention is to take the path of mediation before invoking the HRC’s powers of investigation, including the right to subpoena witnesses.
Government inquiries are the most frustrating: “They will acknowledge receipt of your letter, say it has been referred to the appropriate department — and that’s it,” Tlakula says.
But, she adds, “people become very co-operative when we point out it is an offence to get in the way of our duties”.
Once the new staff fill the echoing offices, their first task will be to sort out which cases are appropriate. The HRC is often mistaken for the truth commission, the public protector’s office, the industrial court and the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. A glance through the letters awaiting attention reveals many that are outside the HRC’s ambit, dealing with apartheid-era abuses, government inefficiency, unfair dismissals and even consumer complaints.
Most common among these are the past abuses, which belong with the truth commission. Since the HRC was established as a watchdog over the Bill of Rights which came into effect on April 27 1994, it cannot take on any cases from before then. Since the truth commission deals only with cases from before December 1995, there’s a tricky three-month grey area in the middle.
It was during that interregnum that rightwingers manned a roadblock and attacked black motorists, killing one of them. The father of one of the victims claims the police ignored a complaint by another driver who was attacked several hours before the fatal incident.
Just who will deal with that conundrum will be decided later. When the staff arrive.