Volume: Volume 19 - 2015

Article type: Refereed article

Author/s: Fuo, Oliver and Du Plessis, Anel

This article advances an alternative perspective on the inception of the concept of a minimum core content for socio-economic rights in the South African context.  The authors reason that despite judicial resistance to adopt, develop and use the idea of a minimum core content in the courts' evaluation of State measures to realise the socio-economic rights entrenched in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, the legislative and executive authority of local government may be put to valuable use. The introductory sections of this article are concentrated on the international, regional and domestic status quo as far as acknowledgment and adoption of the minimum core concept in general are concerned.  The authors subsequently turn from a focus on the courts to the legislative and executive authority of 'developmental local government' against the backdrop of the rationale behind the principle of subsidiarity, to question local government as an alternative route for the actualisation of the concept of a minimum core in the State's realisation of a number of specific socio-economic rights.

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