The five-day hearing by the Western Cape High Court on the challenge brought by the IRR Legal, the DA, and AfriForum against the Expropriation Act ended with a postponement on Friday to a date later in the year.
IRR Legal executive director Gabriel Crouse notes that for all the disappointment of the postponement, the hearing “ended on a strong note”.
Say Crouse: “The judges directed tough questions at the State’s advocates, specifically challenging how nil compensation aligns with the constitutional requirement that the State must use its own resources for land reform.”
In this update on X, Crouse discusses the ramifications.
Earlier in the week, Crouse pointed out in a statement that “[t]he impugned provisions expose owners to under-compensation in a range of arbitrary circumstances, violating the property rights entrenched in the Bill of Rights”.
Land speculators, municipalities with investment property, and land reform beneficiaries fall squarely within the “nil” compensation provisions of the Act.
IRR Legal is represented by advocates David Borgström SC and Janee Karuaihe before a full bench of the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town.
Crouse said key issues in the case included:
- What the purposes of compensation are;
- Whether land reform beneficiaries can be treated as second-class landowners in the way that the Expropriation Act does;
- Whether speculators can be treated as second-class landowners;
- Whether municipalities with investment properties can be targeted for under-compensation;
- Whether the state can under-compensate owners when expropriating for certain purposes but not for others; and
- Whether the Expropriation Act, as some of its defenders claim, does nothing to change the amount of compensation anyone can expect to be paid in the explicitly targeted circumstances.
IRR Legal’s objective, Crouse said, “is to vindicate the Constitution by removing the impugned provisions to prevent confusing legal surplusage and any real cases of under-compensation”.
Read the documents relating to the case here.