Undoing Humiliation, Fostering Equal Citizenship: Human Dignity in South Africa’s Sexual Orientation Equality Jurisprudence

Introduction

The South African jurisprudence on equality employs the concept of human dignity to inform both the interpretation of the South African Constitution’s equality clause and its application. The importance of human dignity to South Africa’s equality jurisprudence arises in part from the lessons of our apartheid history in which wicked, legalized and systematic racial discrimination was antithetical to the concept of human dignity. This brief note describes how the concept of human dignity has been employed in the equality jurisprudence, particularly in relation to discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.

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