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 Euro 2016
The Croatian team has not always been so ethnically homogeneous. Eight years ago the national side included the Brazilian-born Eduardo, one of the country’s most popular players, who had become a naturalised Croat when he was signed by the Dinamo Zagreb youth team. This seemed to mark the start of the diversification of European football, as players switched nationality at the same time that they moved clubs. (Eduardo had calculated that he was more likely to get into the Croatian national team than the Brazilian one; today that would not be such an obvious call.) It hasn’t happened – the melting pot never materialised.
