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Current Awareness 2018: August

General topics of interest

What is Current Awareness?

Current awareness is the term used to describe staying informed by keeping up to date with the latest publications, research and news in your field.

The perspective of current awareness is the present and the forthcoming, as opposed to the retrospective. 

Current awareness ranges from looking for information on specific topics on a regular basis (and this usually involves the assistance of your Personal Librarian to help you set up a search profile matched to your research interests) to embracing a wider, more general, and cross-disciplinary view that brings an element of serendipity into your search for the latest information.

Informally, researchers remain alert in all contexts for useful information and insights that will inform their daily practice, their research, and spark off innovative and creative ideas for new avenues of research.

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Website Of The Month

Women's Rights 

Masimanyane Women’s Rights International, based in South Africa, has brought together three partner organisations to join together in an innovative project which will increase awareness of gender-based violence (GBV), capacitate civil society organisations and young women to take the lead in advocacy campaigns, and hold governments in these countries accountable for ending GBV and ensuring improved service provision for victim-survivors of GBV.

The four partners in the African Programme are:

  • ​Masimanyane Women's Rights International (South Africa)
  • Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (Ghana)
  • Forum Muhler (Mozambique)
  • Mentoring and Empowering Programme for Young Women (Uganda)

About the Monthly Current Awareness Page

The year is marked with many special days, weeks, and months dedicated and devoted to raising awareness about important issues.

This monthly post, compiled by the Information Search Librarians Team, will note special dates and themes, and draw your attention to possibly interesting cross-disciplinary topical references intended to inform and to inspire ideas for research.

 

 

August 2018

Celebrating Women's History in South Africa

South Africa commemorates Women’s Month in August as a tribute to the more than 20 000 women who marched to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956 in protest against the extension of Pass Laws to women. The Government of South Africa declared August women’s month and 9 August is celebrated annually as Women’s Day.

To read about the history of women's struggle in South Africa please visit the South African History Online website.

The box to the right titled Golden Oldies also contain a list of articles written about the history of women's struggle in South Africa.

 

Events in August:

 

In the Media

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Archive

Should you wish to read Current Awareness guides of previous years, please visit the archive:

2014-2015

2016

2017

 

 

Looking for Upcoming 2018 Conferences?

If you are looking for 2018's forthcoming conferences, the following websites are helpful:

 

Golden Oldies

Brooms sweeping oceans? Women's rights in South Africa's first decade of democracy

Author Michelle O'Sullivan and Christina Murray
Source : Acta Juridica, Volume 2005, Issue 1, Jan 2005, p. 1 - 41
Accreditation : Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)

There have been marked changes in the arena of women's rights in South Africa since 1994. The South African Constitution entrenches significant and progressive rights for women. It prohibits unfair discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, pregnancy, and marital status; it recognizes the disadvantage women suffer as a result of a number of intersecting grounds of discrimination, in particular race and gender, and provides for affirmative action; and it entrenches the right to bodily integrity, which includes, the right 'to make decisions concerning reproduction' and, in a clear reference to domestic violence, freedom from 'all forms of violence from either private or public sources'. The reproductive right is complemented, in the provision dealing with the right to health care, by the 'right to have access to ... reproductive health care'. Recognizing that cultural rights can conflict with gender rights, the right to practice one's culture and religion is made subject to the other rights in the Constitution. Similarly, and again with important implications for women, the recognition of marriages concluded under any tradition, or a system of religious, personal or family law' must be 'consistent with' the other provisions of the Constitution. The social and economic rights that the Constitution protects, including the right of access to adequate housing, health care, sufficient food and water, and social security, and the right to education are particularly relevant to women because of the gendered nature of poverty in South Africa. The Constitution also provides for a Commission for Gender Equality to 'promote respect for gender equality and the protection, development and attainment of gender equality'. Since 1994, South Africa has undertaken significant international obligations in respect of women, the most recent of which is the African Protocol on the Rights of Women.

The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa : South Africa's reservations and interpretative declarations

Author Jamil Ddamulira Mujuzi
Source : Law, Democracy & Development, Volume 12, Issue 2, Nov 2008, p. 41 - 61
Accreditation : 
Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the meaning and legal implications of those reservations and interpretative declarations. The discussion is structured in the following order: the status of international law in South Africa is appraised; the drafting history of the Protocol follows; an outline of the articles in the Protocol is done (however, a detailed discussion of these rights falls outside the scope of this article but references are given on each provision for further reading by those interested in in-depth discussions of individual provisions); this is followed by a detailed discussion of the meaning of reservations and interpretative declarations under international law; South Africa's reservations and interpretative declarations to the Protocol and their legal implications are analysed; lastly, conclusions and recommendations are made.