Editorial

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Record Number: sapr1_v33_n1_a4
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Date: 01 October 2018
• DOI: 10.10520/EJC-1222027dcb
• Pages: 1-4
• Published By: UNISA Press
• Author: Chuks Okpaluba

Southern African Public Law

https://doi.org/10.25159/2522 -6800/5073

https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/SAPL

ISSN 2522-6800 (Online)

Volume 33 | Number 1 | 2018 | #5073 | 4 pages

© Unisa Press 2018

EDITORIAL

Chuks Okpaluba

Chief Editor

University of Fort Hare

okpaluba@mweb.co.za

The 2017 volume 32 of the SAPL was a special issue. In it, we published contributions

from a galaxy of South African and international academics, judges and legal

practitioners of great repute all writing in honour of the former Chief Justice of South

Africa, Judge Sandile Ngcobo. Without prejudice to maintaining the regular and normal

issues, the SAPL will, continue to encourage special issues based on particular themes

from time to time.

This number is a normal issue of the journal in which the reader will find various articles

on disparate topics covering a wide-range of areas of public law starting with Sipho

Nkosi’s analysis of the juridical transformative impact on the South African concept of

ubuntu. The question here is not whether ubuntu is recognised as part of South African

law but that the courts, especially the Constitutional Court, had since embraced it and

had made efforts to incorporate it into constitutional adjudication in modern times. In

spite of the colonial era jurisprudence literally relegating the concept into oblivion, the

author hopes that the courts will not only rely on ubuntu to resuscitate old remedies that

had operated in its likelihood, but will also create a new set of remedies that will serve

South Africa’s noble constitutional project.

Not long ago, South Africa was one of the countries in the forefront of not only

negotiating for the adoption of the Rome Statute Establishing the International Criminal

Court, she was equally one of the countries that ratified the Rome Statute and swiftly

enacted a domestic law incorporating its provisions into her domestic jurisprudence. In

her article on the threat of South Africa to withdraw from the ICC, Lee Stone shows

how much in a hurry South Africa wanted to opt out of the Rome Statute without

following the international and domestic parliamentary due processes for doing so. In

the process, South Africa, an ardent supporter of the international human rights since

1994, violated the same international human rights law, ignored international arrest

warrants on Al Bashir, disobeyed court orders in that regard and facilitated Al Bashir’s

departure from South Africa. In interrogating the many legal issues surrounding this

case, the author wondered as to whether the South African government did not create