Malema's speech last month, taken on its own, was a call to "kill" racists or white supremacists, who are not a protected group under our constitutional equality law. I do not believe that the term "racists" or "white supremacists" is coded language for white people as a race. Like in Masuku's case, the speech was not "based on prohibited grounds" and cannot constitute hate speech under South African law.

109-year-old Pon Ng Shue Chee, a beloved matriarch of Johannesburg's close-knit community of Chinese South Africans recently died but not before seeing the end of the five-year-long legal fight against online hate speech.

Discussion with Lourensa Eckard concerning the unsuccessful hate speech case brought by Afriforum against the Economic Freedom Fighters

Advocate Ben Winks joined Eusebius McKaiser on Eusebius on TimesLIVE to explain the judgment handed down on Thursday in the Equality Court, in which AfriForum's case against the EFF was dismissed.

This is obviously a deeply entrenched social problem, rooted in long-held patriarchal notions of male ownership over women’s bodies. The law alone cannot solve it. But the law can, and should, do a lot to validate and vindicate the rights of women (and men and genderqueer people) who are subjected to sexual violations. Instead, what the law in SA does is validate the offender’s subjective sense of entitlement to someone else’s body.

The fight against hatred in South Africa would have been much better off if, at least twenty years ago, the government had passed a simple amendment to the existing law, stating that hateful motive must be counted as an aggravating factor for sentencing. This would have been passed with no controversy or constitutional challenge.

But we must now be alert to the reality that, post-Qwelane, there is apparently greater room for bigots to escape legal consequences for insults and "jokes" that wound not only individuals, but whole groups at once – be they Muslim women, transgender people, refugees, or people with disabilities.

The Constitutional Court's finding that Qwelane's words constituted hate speech achieves two important things for the society that has left him behind. First, it declares that he was wrong: in this constitutional democracy, "gay" is more than "okay"; it is equal and dignified. Public expressions of queer love are brave and, like all love, beautiful.

The reason Zuma is bringing a hopeless rescission application, instead of an appeal, is because the Constitutional Court is the country's highest court of appeal.

In South Africa, it is the end of the judicial road.

But this was not always the case.

The death of Andries Tatane in 2011 should have brought an end to the police’s use of rubber bullets in public order policing, as should the report of the Marikana Commission of Enquiry. The recent death of Mthokozisi Ntumba would have been prevented if this had been done, and once more shows the urgency of the call to stop their use.

Ben Winks for the Nelson Mandela Foundation argued that if the hate speech clause were to be read as closely as possible to section 16 (2) of the Constitution, it would exclude important cases from its ambit.

“Those that argue for maximum freedom of expression don’t tell us what should be done when black people are called bobbejaans or homosexuals are told that same-sex marriage is akin to bestiality. They don’t tell us,” he said.

Just prior to Ngcukaitobi, his junior, Ben Winks, had argued AfriForum and FAK had not challenged the evidence that displaying the apartheid flag “demeans, degrades and dehumanises” black people.

Ben joins Eusebius McKaiser and Karyn Maughan for a discussion about former President Jacob Zuma's "Stalingrad" litigation delay strategy, and how it has been funded by the South African public.

After S&P Global Ratings’ decision to downgrade SA’s sovereign credit rating to subinvestment grade ("junk" status), in swift response to "the executive changes initiated by President Zuma" on March 30, it is important to analyse the institutional weaknesses that allow the executive arm of government to go virtually unchecked in altering the country’s economic destiny, as well as how to correct them.

The recently gazetted draft International Arbitration Bill will finally see SA adopting the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, developed 30 years ago by the UN Commission on International Trade Law (Uncitral). This is a long overdue first step into the modern world of commercial dispute settlement.

Ben speaks to Stephen Grootes on the Midday Report about the legal implications of President Zuma's Nkandla home being declared a National Key Point before R246 million of public money was spent on upgrading it.

The conflicting official reports on the R246-million security upgrade at President Jacob Zuma’s private home in Nkandla, in all their disorienting secrecy and semantic manoeuvring, have left South Africans more confused and frustrated than ever. The political debate now revolves around one obvious question: was any of this money spent on non-security comforts?

POLICE Minister Nathi Nhleko did more than raise the collective eyebrows of the global investment community recently, when he warned that SA "intends to withdraw from its commitments" under its international trade and investment treaties in order to enact a bill that would effectively indigenise the ownership of SA’s private security industry.

This week the Constitutional Court overturned an electoral court finding that the Democratic Alliance had violated the Electoral Act and code of conduct by publishing “false information” intended to influence the outcome of the elections last year.

In our view, in so doing, the court has blurred the established boundary between “comments” and “statements of fact”, which was needed to ensure that the electorate, while exposed to robust democratic debates, remains reliably informed about the facts underlying them.

Former President Thabo Mbeki declared in last week’s Mail & Guardian that he and his successors “owe and will make no apology to anybody whatsoever” for vigorously resisting the disclosure of the report given to him by senior Judges Sisi Khampepe and Dikgang Moseneke, which concluded that Zimbabwe’s 2002 presidential elections “cannot be considered to be free and fair”. Yet Mbeki delivers a rebuke in the dead language of state authority, rather than a reasoned response in our own budding dialect of state accountability.