Lawyering protest : critique and creativity. Where to from here in the public interest legal sector?

AuthorLisa Chamberlain,Gina Snyman
DOI10.10520/EJC-b69a678f5
Published date01 December 2017
Date01 December 2017
Record Numberiscrime_n62_a2
Pages7-20
7
SA CRIME QUARTERLY NO. 62 • DECEMBER 2017
Lawyering protest:
critique and creativity
Where to from here in the
public interest legal sector?
* Lisa Chamberlain is the deputy director of the Centre for Applied
Legal Studies and a senior lecturer at the School of Law,
University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Lisa holds a BA LLB (Wits)
and an LLM (University of Michigan). Gina Snyman is a member
of the Johannesburg Bar and the in-house counsel for the Centre
for Applied Legal Studies, School of Law, Wits. Gina holds an
LLB (UPE) and an LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation
in Africa (UP). The authors are indebted to Tarin Page and Rudo
Mhiribidi, who provided valuable research assistance in the
preparation of this article.
Frequent protests, arising from a diversity of motivations, are a feature of the South African
landscape. Despite the right to protest being entrenched in section 17 of the Constitution, it is
under threat, and communities seeking to protest increasingly risk criminalisation. This article
identifies some of the emerging themes in the protest landscape and the way the right to protest
is being suppressed. Four dominant themes are highlighted through the lens of the experiences
of the public interest legal sector: the conflation of notification and permission; heavy-handed
state responses to protests; the abuse of bail procedures; and the use of interdicts. Law has
become at least one of the sites of contestation in the protest arena. The political space held
open by the existence of the right to protest is thus closing as a result of violations of this right. It
is therefore both useful and necessary to interrogate the role of lawyers in such contestation. This
article also examines the context and nature of the public interest legal sector’s response to these
emerging themes.
Lisa Chamberlain and Gina Snyman*
lisa.chamberlain@wits.ac.za
gina.snyman@wits.ac.za
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3108/2017/v0n62a3059
There should be little need for protest in
a functioning participatory democracy.1
Yet protest is an entrenched part of the
South African psyche, and a core tactic of
activists pushing for change of all kinds. In
South Africa, protest is not just a tactic of
revolution, but a protected human right.
Nevertheless, protesters often risk arrest
and criminalisation, given that protest is
frequently a means of last resort, used when
frustrated communities can no longer justify
continued fruitless attempts at engagement.2
Part one of this article touches briefly on
the drivers of protest, while part two sets
the scene with an outline of the regulatory
system applicable to protest. Part three
examines various ways in which the right to
protest is being suppressed. Lastly, part
four discusses the role of the public interest
legal sector in responding to these attempts
at suppression.

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