Judge slams rape discrimination

A Pretoria High Court judge has slated legislation that ‘discriminated’ between child r ape victims, with the rapists of boys facing far less severe sentences than those who r aped girls. Judge Eben Jordaan and Acting Judge E Tolmay set aside a three-year jail sentence imposed by a Pretoria magistrate on a petrol attendant who lured a six-year-old boy into his house and sodomised him. A News24 report says the man had been convicted of indecent assault and sentenced to three years imprisonment, by the magistrate. The High Court, however, set aside the sentence, and replaced it with a 15-year jail term that was even more severe than the 10-year minimum sentence presently prescribed by the Minimum Sentences Act for indecent assault. Jordaan described the discrimination between male and female child r ape victims as ‘ridiculous’ and said it could not be countenanced in a constitutional dispensation like South Africa's. He described the indecent assault on the boy as ‘male r ape’ and said there was no difference between the trauma experienced by male and female child victims of sexual assault.
Full report on the News24 site

 

Supplied courtesy of Legalbrief Today.

 

Call for laws to protect rights of landlords

It is time the government realised that landlords also have rights and passed legislation to protect them, says Stan Brasg, a leading Johannesburg property lawyer in a report in The Star. Brasg supported his argument by citing a litany of cases of landlords who were morally in the right but lost houses and blocks of flats to what he terms agents provocateurs simply for the lack of a landlord-friendly law. Two of his clients walked away from blocks of flats they owned, because the occupiers had not paid rent for many months, and there was practically nothing they could do to evict them or force them to pay. The report cites the example of how a homeowner, despite paying R64 000 in legal fees – and spending two nights in jail for his efforts to evict a tenant – lost a R1.4m house in Sandton because the tenant was able to withhold paying rent for a year by manipulating the law.
Full report in The Star

 

Supplied courtesy of Legalbrief Today.