Masifundise Development Trust and Coastal Links is hosting South Africa’s first Fisher People Tribunal from 12 to 14 August 2024 at the Holy Trinity Church in Kalk Bay, Cape Town. Masifundise, a civil society organisation, has supported rural small-scale fishing (SSF) communities for the past 20 years, advocating for human rights and food sovereignty.
Masifundise has been working with rural small-scale fishing communities for over 20 years, supporting their mobilisation and organisation to realise human rights and food sovereignty. Since 2020, Masifundise and Coastal Links South Africa, representing over 5 000 members, have been strategising to respond to developments impacting inland and coastal communities. The Fisher People’s Tribunal emerged from these discussions as a vital platform to advocate for social, economic, and environmental justice for fishers and other community members.
Background
Post-apartheid South Africa has made efforts to address historical inequalities in the fisheries sector. The Marine Living Resources Act (MLRA) of 1998 aimed to transform the fishing industry but did not fully include small-scale fishers, who were often marginalized. In response, small-scale fishers, supported by Masifundise and other organizations, have fought for recognition and rights, leading to the Small-scale Fisheries Policy (SSFP) in 2012. This policy represented a shift toward collective rights and community empowerment.
Despite these advancements, the implementation of the SSFP has faced challenges, and many small-scale fishers remain excluded from accessing marine resources. Inland fishers also face marginalization, with policies often favoring recreational fishing over small-scale livelihoods. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted these issues, with many fishers unable to provide for their communities. These developments are taking place in the context of the global climate disaster and the growing socio-economic crisis, in which fishing communities found themselves at the frontline.
Blue Economy and Conservation
In recent years, the South African government has prioritized the Blue Economy, notably through initiatives like Operation Phakisa and the Ocean Economy Masterplan. These initiatives aim to boost economic growth by expanding sectors such as marine transport, offshore oil and gas, aquaculture, and tourism. While these developments promise economic benefits, they often come at the expense of small-scale fishing communities, leading to ocean grabbing and restricted access to traditional fishing grounds.
Conservation efforts, such as the expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs) and nature reserves, have similarly impacted these communities. Although these measures aim to boost environmental sustainability, their implementation has frequently excluded the participation of local fishers, resulting in conflicts and the criminalization of local fishing activities. Effective conservation must balance ecological goals with the rights and livelihoods of small-scale fishers, ensuring that their traditional knowledge and needs are incorporated into management plans.
Objectives
The Fisher People’s Tribunal aims to systematically document and expose violations of fishing communities’ rights and to promote an alternative vision for socially and environmentally just use of ocean resources. Key objectives include:
Assessing the socio-economic context and threats to fishing communities.
Reviewing current ocean governance and policy implementations.
Developing a vision and campaign for food sovereignty and climate justice.
Six cases will be presented to a jury of sector experts.
Case 1: The broken promises of the Small- scale Fisheries Policy
This will be a key case looking at what went wrong with regards to the implementation of the progressive SSF Policy in South Africa
Case 2: Inland fisheries and lack of access in Gariep Dam
This case will highlight the challenges faced by inland fishers due to lack of recognition and access due to nature reserves and private land ownership.
Case 3: Isimangaliso and the violence of the Conservation Fortress
This case will highlight how the approach to conservation as practiced in iSimangaliso is resulting in HR violations of fisherfolks and their communities. Importantly in this case we want to highlight the role of tourism and ENGOs in relation to conservation.
Case 4: Disregard of Customary Fishing Rights and Tenure in Dwesa-Cwebe
This case will present how, despite a court judgement in 2018 recognising the customary rights of fisher people in Dwesa-Cwebe (Eastern Cape), their rights are being eroded and fishers have been experiencing violence from nature conservation authorities
Case 5: The West Coast of Extraction
This case will provide evidence on how the entire West Coast of South Africa is being allocated for mining, oil and gas and GH2 activities, leaving no space for fishers and their livelihood activities.
Case 6: In the intertidal zone, women in small- scale fisheries in times of climate emergency
In April 2022, KwaZulu-Natal faced a severe climate disaster, devastating homes and livelihoods, including women reliant on mussel harvesting. This case examines post-flood assistance and advocates for policies addressing climate change, gender inequality, and economic vulnerability.
Meet the jurors
Makoma Lekalakala is a South African activist, and the Director of Earthlife Africa, an environmental justice activist anti-nuclear organisation. Her commitment to climate justice in South Africa has led civil society to win the first South African climate change legal court case against the government and the reversal of the nuclear deal by the South African and the Russian government. For her efforts she received the Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa in 2018 and the Nick Steel Memorial: Environmentalist of the Year 2018 amongst other accolades. She is currently serving as a Commissioner on the South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission.
Emeritus Professor Ben Cousins is scholar focusing on the Political Economy of Agrarian Reform and land tenure, with a focus on production, property and power and their interconnections in the context of land and agrarian reform in Southern Africa. His research is strategic and oriented towards use by policy-makers and civil society groups concerned to reduce poverty and inequality through redistributing assets, securing rights and democratizing decision-making. He founder the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) in 1995 at the University of Western Cape (UWC) and was director until 2009. He has held a DST/NRF Research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies from 2010 to 2019. In 2013, he received an inaugural Elinor Ostrom Award, in the senior scholar category, for his contribution to scholarship on the common.
Andy Johnston has been a fisher for 50 years and is a South African activist, who dedicated much of his life to support artisanal fisherfolk in their struggle for recognition and legal access to fishing. Andy was the Director of the Artisanal Fishers Association. Andy has been involved in numerous international policy processes related to the governance of fisheries, including participating in the Working Group on the development of the Voluntary Guidelines of the Right to Food at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and a member of the Task Team for the development of the SA Small-scale Fisheries Policy. Andy is a founding member of the World Forum of Fisher People (WFFP).
Professor Uche Ewelukwa Ofodile is a Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas Schoolcof Law. She is also an Affiliated Professor of the Department of Political Science and of Africancand African American Studies at the University of Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright College of Artscand Sciences. She is a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-RahmanicCenter for Business and Government and an Honorary Fellow of the Asian Institute of FinancialcLaw in Hong Kong. Professor Ofodile holds an LL.B. from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an LL.M. (in International Business Law) from the University College London, an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and an SJD from Harvard Law School. She is an award-winning legal scholar who has been featured in legal magazines and publications and whose articles have appeared in leading national and international law journals as well as in magazines, newspapers, and blogs. She is an active member of the America Bar Association and the Nigeria Bar Association. Professor Odofile is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including, the award from Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law, the Albert Einstein Institution, and the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA–Nigeria). In 2024, Professor Ofodile was appointed by the UN Human Right Council as the Expert member from African States to the Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural areas.
Miloon Kothari is an Indian scholar and independent Human Rights Expert, currently visiting Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. From 2000 to 2008, Miloon served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing with the Human Right Council. Since 2015, he is President of UPR Info. He was convenor of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN (WGHR) from 2009 to 2014, an Indian human rights coalition that notably focuses on the Universal Periodic Review. Kothari was also Visiting Scholar 2013-2014 at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Kothari has published over 50 publications on numerous areas related to Human Rights and Social Policy.
Gianni Tognoni is an Italian physician and the General Secretary of the Permanent People’s Tribunal, since the PPT was established in 1979. As the General Secretary of the PPT, he has been involved in numerous processes all over the world aiming at supporting grassroots communities and organisations in promoting the fundamental rights of peoples and human rights. As physician, he has a long history of research, widely published internationally, in the fields of clinical trials, public health, drug policy, with a focus on community and citizenship epidemiology, with extensive collaborations also in Central and Latin America. He is part the Mario Negri Institute, now associated with the University of Milan.
Jury support: Paula Satizabal is a Colombian activist and Human Geographer and currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Her research uses a political ecology approach to study how regional political economic processes produce environmental governance institutions, power/knowledge dynamics, and territorial struggles. She is currently working on law enforcement, criminalisation, and the search for justice at sea. Her work examines marine governance processes focusing on historically marginalised coastal communities. She draws inspiration from anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist thinkers, learning and working from her own research praxis to challenge ahistorical spatial configurations and open space for relational and spatialised understandings of justice at sea. In 2020, Paula served as a Jury member on the Blue Economy Tribunal in Asia and she is the co-author of “Ocean, Water and Fisher Peoples’ Tribunal”, a report published by the Transnational institute in 2024.
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