Cape Town – The South African Human Rights Commission has flagged the Western Cape office as a concern after it recorded a high number of active complaints that exceeded finalised complaints in 2016/17 by a ratio of 2:3.
The commission released its annual report on trends in human right violations in South Africa. The trends analysis provided a breakdown of violations over the past five years and included complaints per province, a profile of the complainants and a snapshot of complaints registered by the commission.
For many poor black people - for example, farm and domestic workers in South Africa - racism was a part of the daily fabric of their lives and they remained vulnerable to racist treatment, name calling and race-based attacks, said the report.
The Western Cape office received the highest number of enquiries, followed by Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provincial offices.
The Eastern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga and North-West provincial offices received the smallest number of enquiries, with Limpopo and the Northern Cape provincial offices receiving similarly few enquiries.
“The considerable variation in enquiry rates per province suggest that there is a need to ensure that the public is aware of the existence of provincial offices where there are low enquiry volumes. High enquiry volumes tend to correlate with high-density populations.
“However, the number of enquiries to the commission in these provinces bears out the need to intensify initiatives seeking to increase awareness about the various complaints bodies in South Africa.
This has been documented in a 2015 public survey by the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) that indicates that only about 10% of the population is aware of the mandates of the Chapter 9 institutions,” the report said.
The 2015/2016 year saw 505 complaints of 749 relating to race, a 40% increase from 2014/15 which had 289 recorded complaints, and about 10 times more than the next two highest grounds - disability, and ethnic and social origin.
“In the 2016/17 year, race, disability and ethnic or social origin continue to be the highest grounds of equality related complaints reported to the Commission. Almost all equality related complaints have decreased in number, except for disability."
One of the report's drafters, Alexandra Fitzgerald, said over the five years the largest number of complaints were around equality.
“It reflects that the complaints are of racial discrimination against black South Africans the majority of cases we litigated were cases where the k-word was used, also terms like baboon, ape or monkey,” she said.
SAHRC chairperson Bongani Majola said in the 2016/17 year, 90% of their cases were successfully finalised.