Willem Richter, working abroad temporarily, has won his first leg of a law suit against his government, in which the Pretoria High court

Willem Richter, working abroad temporarily, has won his first leg of a law suit against his government, in which the Pretoria High court ruled that the government had to provide voting facilities to all expats. Now the Constitutional Court was asked to confirm the ruling on March 4 2009. Ex-president F W de Klerk has come out in strong support of the law suit.The South African interim-government has appealed against the country's highest court 's ruling ordering it to provide voting facilities for all of the country's 2-million expats. The Constitutional Court still must ratify the ruling on March 4. seeTo prevent these 2-million expat South Africans from voting – most blame the country’s crime epidemic on the ANC-regime, and thus aren’t likely to vote for the ANC -- caretaker president Kgalema Motlanthe has meanwhile already rushed through a formal announcement of the election date in parliament, setting it for April 22 - thus effectively preventing the expats from registering their votes in time. Once the election date was formally proclaimed, no new voters may be admitted to the registered with the Independent Electoral Commission, by law. South Africans who were forced abroad by the South African race-based employment laws and the country's out-of-control crime epidemic, now find that their homeland has also turned its back on them permanently — or at least views them as second-class citizens, denied them voting rights while abroad.
Under South African law, convicted criminals are allowed to vote but -- expatriates are denied this constitutional right. One of the largest opposition parties leader Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, called it a bitter irony. “In most constitutional democracies, prisoners are not entitled to vote while nationals living abroad are. In South Africa, we have the opposite situation…” she said.
The Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus party, who had obtained the High Court judgement on behalf of Willem Richter, an Afrikaner teacher working temporarily in the UK, today slammed Motlanthe's shock proclamation of the election date - accusing him of 'contempt of the Constitutional Court -- which still has to decide the isssue on March 4.' "Motlanthle’s early proclamation could create confusion among the public and South Africans abroad who want to vote," Freedom Front spokesman dr Pieter Mulder said in South Africa.>%20Social">seeThe ANC-government's Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula has meanwhile launched an appeal against the Pretoria High Court ruling, claiming that it had contained 'mistakes'. She told the state-owned SA broadcasting corporation's radio station that the acting-cabinet was opposed to supplying polling stations abroad for expatriate South Africans. The caretaker-government claims that it would be 'too cumbersome a procedure' for which they did not have enough staffers. The BBC news agency in the United Kingdom reports meanwhile that some 2-milion South Africans now live and work abroad - some 600,000 of whom live in the UK. The opposition Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus party had brought this original case on behalf of Willem Richter, a South African school teacher living in the UK. The SABC quotes Mrs Mapisa-Nqakula as saying that the ruling "disqualified certain classes of absent citizens from voting - and was therefore discriminatory." It's not entirely clear who she might be referring to: she didn't elaborate. However the Pretoria High Court ruling was very clear in its judgment: it said that 'all South Africans abroad must be given voting facilities abroad'.