Human rights in SA must move beyond survival to flourishing

2026-03-25 - 03:30

On 21 March, 1960, 69 people were killed at Sharpeville for daring to assert their humanity. Sixty-six years later, on Human Rights Day this past Saturday, we honoured that moment and took stock of the constitutional democracy emerging from its ashes. Our constitution is a remarkable document. It enshrines justiciable socioeconomic rights, commits the state to transformation and opens with a founding value that has no equivalent in any other constitutional order: human dignity. And yet, for the majority of South Africans, the distance between the rights they hold on paper and the lives they are able to live remains vast, stubborn and morally intolerable. I suggest that the problem is not only one of implementation, of a capable state failing to deliver, though that failure is real and must be named. The deeper problem is conceptual. We have been asking whether rights are being violated, when we should also be asking whether human beings are flourishing. These are related but not identical questions. And conflating them is costing us. Limit of the violation frame Rights-based frameworks are powerful precisely because they are justiciable: when a right is violated, a court can intervene. The Constitutional Court has done extraordinary work on access to housing, on health care, on the rights of children. This is a genuine achievement of