Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
On international law and secession
While international law embraces the right to self-determination for all people, and while this right can effectively translate into remedial secession, international law positively allows for this outcome only in the case of decolonization and, perhaps, occupation. Other than these two relatively rare instances, international law does not affirmatively authorize groups to seek secession. Secession inherently undermines the territorial integrity of the mother state, and international law has for centuries espoused the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. Embracing the right of secession would jeopardize the above-mentioned principles and could, as critics assert, potentially lead to global chaos caused by an incessant
redrawing of boundaries.
