Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
On Brexit
Nothing that [UK prime minister Theresa] May was proposing was unconstitutional. There is no constitution. It was an archaic convention she was violating: the peculiar English belief in ‘parliamentary sovereignty’. The slogan in the referendum was ‘Take Back Control.’ But of what and from whom? The establishment Leavers said: ‘Take back the sovereignty of Parliament, the Ark of the English Covenant. England isn’t England if Parliament can be overruled by anyone – least of all by foreigners.’
