Centre for Environmental Rights – Advancing Environmental Rights in South Africa

The Centre for Environmental Rights’ (CER) Activist Support and Training Programme welcomes the 15 activists selected to participate in the 2025 edition of the Rights and Remedies Course (R&R).

The course started today and will run for the next three weeks. Participants have been chosen from communities all over South Africa and will be engaging over the next weeks on a broad array of topics designed to strengthen activism, solidarity and legal advocacy in the environmental and climate justice movement.

Rights and Remedies is back for the 8^th time, following a pause for a year of monitoring and reflection. During 2024, we took stock of the course content, travelled to speak with alumni of the course, and chartered a way forward with a renewed sense of direction and purpose for R&R.

The course is being held in Gauteng for the first time and will cover topics including communications and media, movement building, engaging with the Constitution and the bill of rights, the South African environmental and mining legal regime with a special focus on public participation processes and compliance, monitoring and enforcement of these laws. The participants bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience to deepen workshops on mining and local economic development, access to information, air quality and pollution, climate change, gas and the just energy transition. We will delve into gendered aspects of environmental and climate activism, the right to protest and bail, the role and protections for human rights defenders and water advocacy strategies – to name just a few of the topics covered.

Nonjabulo Doyisa, an alumni of R&R and member of the CER’s Corporate Accountability and Transparency programme welcomed the participants setting the tone for the course saying:

We are gathered here from different backgrounds, united by a common purpose: defending our Section 24 rights entrenched in the Constitution, our fundamental human right to an environment that is not harmful to our health and wellbeing. We are all here today, brought together by the objective of achieving climate justice in our lifetime. We are here because we want a just transition that is for the people, not driven by profit and the interests of capital. We are here today because we say no to corruption, no to corporate impunity, no to neocapitalism. We are here today to say yes to clean and safe air and water. We say yes to affordable and accessible energy, yes to housing, skills and true economic inclusion. Over these next weeks, we will learn, we will teach, we will strategise, and yes – we will also laugh, dance, sing and create joy together.”

Matome Kapa programme head of Activist Support and Training emphasised the role of activists in bringing the Constitution to life, as well as accountability and integrity in leadership in the environmental movements saying:

Environmental and climate justice work is radical. It challenges power. It goes to the heart of capitalism and extraction. Empires have been built on pollution and exploitation – so when we say, things need to change, we are challenging the very foundations of entrenched, well-resourced global systems. That is why this work can be slow, hard and sometimes dangerous. But it is also righteous. And necessary. It is for this reason that we are gathered here to build courage, grow our leadership and be part of a global movement against inequality and suffering.”

Rights & Remedies has launched its dedicated new website which can be accessed here: https://rightsremedies.org.za