Legislation: Two more months to table Constitution Amendment Bill?

The National Assembly will this afternoon consider whether to extend to 30 May the deadline for finalising and introducing legislation amending section 25 of the Constitution to explicitly provide for expropriation without compensation as one measure for accelerating land reform, reports Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch. This legislation will take the form of a Constitution 18th Amendment Bill, a draft of which was released in December for comment. The ad hoc committee responsible for preparing the Bill was originally given until 30 March to complete its work.

However, as Legalbrief Today has already reported, nationwide public hearings aimed at gleaning how ordinary South Africans would like the amendment worded are now scheduled to continue until 2 April – after which the committee will conduct parliamentary hearings on any oral representations stakeholders may wish to make in support of their written input. Members will then be briefed on these and the thousands of other written submissions received. Only then will they begin discussing the possibility of changing the wording of the amendment proposed in the draft Bill – informed by input from the entire public consultation process, along with any proposals political parties may choose to table. It will be left to the revised Expropriation Bill to spell out the circumstances in which land expropriation without compensation may be deemed justifiable.