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
LLM scholarships at UCT: 2017
Claude Leon Foundation Scholarships in Constitutional Governance 2017
2 LLM scholarships (R80 000 each for 2017)
Prof Pierre de Vos, the Claude Leon Chair in Constitutional Governance at the University of Cape Town Law Faculty, invites suitably qualified applicants to submit applications for the above post-graduate scholarships. The successful applicants will preferably be South African citizens (although non-South African citizens from the rest of the continent would be awarded the scholarship in exceptional circumstances) who plan to embark on Master’s degree by dissertation in 2017 in the fields of South African or comparative Human Rights Law, Constitutional Law or other legal and political questions relating to constitutional governance, constitutionalism, rights discourse or the promotion of social justice – including topics that require interdisciplinary research. The dissertations will be supervised by the Chair in Constitutional Governance.
- The successful applicants will have an excellent academic record. In making the selection, the selection panel will strive to select a cohort of recipients broadly representative of South Africa’s racial and gender composition.
- The scholarship will be awarded for a period of one year;
- The selected scholars will be required to provide reasonable research assistance to the Chair in Constitutional Governance; and
- The selected scholars will be expected to live in Cape Town or surroundings to be reasonably present at the University of Cape Town.
For further information contact: pierre.devos@uct.ac.za or 021 6503079.
Applicants must send a covering letter providing motivation for the application, accompanied by a full curriculum vitae with the names and contact details of three referees, all available undergraduate degree transcripts and a short (no more than one page) proposal indicating the possible topic of the post-graduate research to: pierre.devos@uct.ac.za by no later than 24 June 2016.
