Private international law: Lesotho High Court assumes South Africa’s High Court jurisdiction – Sello Ramalitse v Mpeesa Ramalitse

From text: Sello Ramalitse v Mpeesa Ramalitse is a divorce case involving two South Africans, resident in South Africa. The Ramalitse case was brought by the applicant before the High Court of  Lesotho wherein he requested the Court to grant him a divorce against the respondent and to award him sole custody of their minor child N aged six. Before the parties married, the respondent was a citizen of Lesotho. Upon marriage to the applicant, the respondent took the applicant’s citizenship and residence, which is that of South Africa. Ever since her marriage to the applicant, the respondent resided in South Africa with the applicant and the couple had a child born of their marriage. The child is a South African born of South African parents and is resident in South Africa with his parents. The couple has movable and immovable property in South Africa and also work in South Africa. The case was heard before Justice Kelello Guni of the High Court of Lesotho (also Judge of the African Court of Human and Peoples Rights 2006-2010) who then granted divorce as requested by the applicant in his prayers. The Judge, however, denied the applicant sole custody of the child. Rather, she ordered joint custody and further ordered the applicant to pay monthly maintenance towards the minor child, N

Sterility as a ground for nullifying the marriage: Can Venter and Van Niekerk be reconciled?

From text: For a marriage to be valid, all the statutory and common law requirements must be satisfied. In a case where all the requirements of marriage are prima facie present, but one or more of the requirements is defective because of, relevant to this work, material misrepresentation, such marriage is regarded as voidable. With material misrepresentation, the question is whether a person in the position of the innocent party would not have entered into the marriage had s/he been aware of the true nature of things. Of course, not every aspect of misrepresentation can lead to material misrepresentation; the misrepresentation must relate to the material aspect of marriage, and those include serious diseases, impotence and others, but this paper deals only with sterility. Sterility has thus been defined as infertility, that is, “the ability to have sexual intercourse but unable to procreate children”

Copyright Reform in South Africa: Two Joint Academic Opinions on the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B 2017]

South Africa is in the process of reforming its copyright law, attempting to update and align it with constitutional rights and existing and prospective international treaty obligations. With the adoption of the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B-2017] by both Houses of Parliament in March 2019, the apartheid-era Copyright Act of 1978 had almost successfully been amended, when the President of the Republic withheld his assent to the Bill referring it back to Parliament citing reservations about its constitutionality. Following calls for public comment by the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry on the President's reservations, a coalition of copyright and constitutional law experts, convinced of the constitutionality of the Bill, submitted two legal opinions to the Committee. The two opinions presented in this contribution underline the importance of copyright reform, as envisaged in the Bill, to bringing South African copyright law into the digital age and realising several constitutional rights including the rights to education, cultural participation, language, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge of everyone, without discrimination