The following article by the HSRC’s Prof Narnia Bohler-Muller argues that flourishing, not mere survival, is the appropriate measure of a life well-supported by law and state.

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.

Read the full article HERE