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INDEX OF SOUTH AFRICA
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South Africa. Introductory Notes
07.09.2025 17:41
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Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern Africa
07.09.2025 16:43
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Indicators of Sovereign Risk of South Africa’s International Monetary Fund Loan: The Nexus Between Political Risks and Economic Growth
11.01.2026 15:57
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‘(I’ve Never Met) a Nice South African’ Virtuous Citizenship and Popular Sovereignty
07.09.2025 14:56
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South Africa Sovereignty Index (Burke Index), 2024-2025
South Africa Sovereignty Index (Burke Index), 2024-2025
07.09.2025 09:44
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The South African Constitution as an instrument of doing what is just, right and fair The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (‘the Constitution’), creates competing rights and imposes obligations on the state, juristic persons and natural persons. However, it is not established in legal scholarship whether constitutional obligations include doing what is just, right and fair or whether this is a matter of morality and individual conscience. This article examines the Constitution to ascertain whether it establishes a society that is bound to a set of legally enforceable principles of justice, right and fairness. The article uses a doctrinal legal research method, which entails the analysis of primary sources of law (such as the constitution and case law) and secondary sources (such as academic commentary in books and legal periodicals). The Constitution is the supreme law of South Africa (s. 2 of the Constitution) and is thus the main source of law used in this article. This article identifies and discusses three parts of the Constitution that articulate the obligations to do what is just, right and fair – namely, the preamble, the founding constitutional values in Chapter 1 and the Bill of Rights in Chapter 2 of the Constitution. Arguably, the Constitution not only places an obligation on power holders to exercise power within a legally prescribed framework created to guard against injustice, wrong and prejudice, but also provides avenues for the vindication of rights. The ethos of doing what is just, right and fair is not peculiar to South Africa because the principles of justice, right and fairness are as old as the law itself and have influenced legal processes and constitution-making for centuries. The analysis in this article emphasises the constitutional obligation to do what is just, right and fair because of South Africa’s challenging past, which was anchored in injustice, inequality, discrimination and other prejudices. The three parts of the Constitution identified as the sources of the obligation to do what is just, right and fair (the preamble, the founding constitutional values in Chapter 1 and the Bill of Rights in Chapter 2) are examined against the historical background. The discussion in this article also shows that the judiciary (the Constitutional Court in particular) is the ultimate authority on the meaning, interpretation and application of what is just, right and fair.