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The colloquium on The Many Faces of Inequality was held on 4 and 5th August at the University of Johannesburg. It was hosted by the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law (SAIFAC), a centre of the University of Johannesburg, in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.
Equality lies at the heart of South Africa’s constitutional project and the international human rights system. Yet, more than three decades after the advent of constitutional democracy, and despite an extensive body of equality jurisprudence and human rights norms, inequality remains deeply entrenched and increasingly complex. Material disparities continue to manifest across multiple and intersecting axes, including socio-economic status, race, gender, migration status, access to technology, and vulnerability to environmental harm. These inequalities undermine human dignity, erode social cohesion, and threaten the transformative aspirations of constitutionalism.
The colloquium sought to foreground constitutional and human rights-based approaches to understanding and addressing inequality, with a particular emphasis on substantive equality, intersectionality, and structural injustice. It created a scholarly forum in which participants critically assessed how constitutional, international, and regional legal frameworks respond to contemporary forms of inequality, where they fall short, and how they may be reimagined to better realize the transformative commitments embedded in equality guarantees.
