Welcome to the Global Environmental Law Centre (GELC).
We are based at the Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. We are affiliated to the Department of Public Law and Jurisprudence. We strive for globally impactful research, teaching and knowledge exchange in a wide range of interconnected areas of global environmental law and governance.
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Steeped in a culture of human rights and constitutionalism, the Faculty has a proud tradition of socially engaged research and publication.
This course focuses largely on the current regulation of animals and the environment in South African law and highlights the scope and application of animal rights and rights of Nature in foreign domestic legal contexts as possible examples from which the South African context can draw lessons.
This Master’s Degree aims to equip students with an advanced understanding of the scope and evolution of environmental law, as well as an in-depth knowledge of the major concepts, cases, principles and key debates that shape effective environmental law and governance frameworks and approaches.
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In 1956, Doris Stenton published The English Woman in History. According to her, the Norman Conquest of 1066 ended the egalitarian social status of Anglo-Saxon women and ‘introduced into England a military society’ that made women ‘essentially unimportant’ (p. 348).
Werner Scholtz, professor of law at UWC, has called for a paradigm shift in international environmental law, which he says ‘is concerned with the conservation, inter alia, of sentient species, but generally ignores the welfare of individual animals.
My thought experiment in this paper leads me to the conclusion that South Africa’s environmental governance performance often experiences what l term ‘hollow environmentalism’: the inevitable overall long-term outcome resulting from the practice of promulgating seemingly symbolic laws and policies whose objectives are often not fulfilled.
The discussions on animal rights strongly focus on the plight of domestic animals and tend to have a laissez-faire approach to wild animals.
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