UV legal team concedes: Violence trumps Constitution

20 June 2016

In the legal battle of Solidarity, AfriForum and AfriForum Youth against the University of the Free State (UFS) that is heard in the High Court in Bloemfontein today, the UFS’s legal team admitted that the decision of a new language policy that will exclude Afrikaans as medium of instruction had been taken not because of financial reasons, but because Afrikaans leads to segregation – according to them.  

According to Johan Kruger, deputy CEO of Solidarity, the UFS’s management hereby admits that violence trumps the Constitution. “The fact is that Afrikaans, presented here practically as the Constitution intends, must bend the knee before anarchy. It is a political game that is being paraded as a language issue.”

The UFS said that it wasn’t reasonably practical to continue with Afrikaans education, as the campus was burning. “According to them, the interpretation of the Constitution cannot be as in the Roman times when justice had to have been served even if heaven fell, but that it should rather bend the knee before anarchy,” says Kruger.

Alana Bailey, AfriForum’s Deputy CEO, emphasises that no right could be promoted by taking away another right. The UFS offers parallel-medium education and no student is deprived of a study opportunity because another student’s right to Afrikaans mother-tongue education is respected. “If decisions in the country are being made as a result of threats of violence, we can no longer pretend it to be a democracy. It is the bigger background against which the case takes place,” she adds.

Judgement is being reserved.

Issued by Johan Kruger, Deputy CEO, Solidarity, 20 June 2016