Human Rights Violations in South Africa: Race and Sexual Orientation (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: All over the world, in every country, and every second, human rights are violated. There are countries where the situation is not as bad compared to others, which may be why people there assume that there are no human rights violations, but unfortunately, they can be found anywhere. One could choose any country in the world and focus on its human rights violations; it is always possible to find a shocking amount of information regardless of the country. In this seminar paper, I want to elucidate the human rights violations in a country that some people might not necessarily consider a negative example: South Africa. However, one of the fundamental problems with South Africa is that, to this day, the country has been unable to successfully fight its problems. These problems are numerous and cannot be fully explained in this short seminar paper, but it is important to have an overview of the whole situation, which is why I must recommend that people inform themselves about the ongoing situation and developments. In this paper, a quick overview shall be given of two very important issues in South Africa: race and sexual orientation. As everybody can imagine, South Africa's situation today is still highly influenced by its past. The country struggles to reach racial reconciliation of its black and white people long after the Apartheid. The situation for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) people is equally difficult since there is still a high proportion of South Africans who do not accept them and sometimes even violate their human rights in horrible and unimaginable ways. It is even more shocking to hear about these issues considering that South Africa has had a Constitution since the 1990s that should largely prevent discrimination and inequality. Section 9 of the Constitution's Bill of Rights explicitly addresses the issues of race and sexual orientation, but, based on the ongoing, unresolved conflicts, its power is, in practice, limited. What are the reasons for all these human rights violations in South Africa? This paper was written in the context of the seminar "Human Rights Violations in Literature, Popular and Digital Cultures" of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In said seminar, we learned a lot about human rights violations all over the world, including those in countries where one would not expect them.