China says it has stopped harvesting organs, but evidence belies its claim

The Chinese government has claimed the country no longer harvests organs from prisoners. But recent revelations about two leading Chinese researchers indicate this may not be true.

In 2005, China publicly stated what many already believed: that its transplant system was built on harvesting organs from criminals sentenced to death (“executed prisoners”). According to declarations by officials, this practice has been banned since January 2015, with organs now sourced from volunteer citizen donors.

Based on these claims of reform, Chinese transplant doctors hoped to participate in international conferences and high-level meetings, publish in prestigious English-language journals and engage in academic collaborations.

But recent events challenge this somewhat rosy picture of organ donation and transplantation reform in China.

Contradictory accounts

First, the Vatican was widely condemned for inviting Chinese transplant officials to participate in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences summit on organ trafficking and transplant tourism.

The complaints centred on the involvement of Huang Jiefu, the current chair of the National Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee, ex-vice minister of health, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Political Consultative Conference, and deputy director of the secretive party committee that looks after the health of top cadres.

There were doubts that Huang would present an accurate or complete picture of organ procurement in China. He has given contradictory accounts of organ sources in China for many years.

The media coverage caused embarrassment to the Vatican and apparently led to the cancellation of the Pope’s planned address to the summit. After persistent questions, Huang admitted organ transplants from prisoners still occur. He cited the vast size of his country as an impediment to reform.

Several articles have drawn attention to the double meaning of the term “executed prisoner”. And independent investigators have identified that they include prisoners of conscience, who are executed for their organs without due process, as well as death-sentence prisoners whose organs are harvested after judicial execution.

In 2005, Huang ordered two spare livers as back-up for a technically difficult procedure. It is hard to imagine how this order could have been met in a system that relied solely on organs from prisoners sentenced to death. Prisoners must be executed within seven days of being sentenced to death, according to Chinese law, and are often not healthy enough to donate organs.

But the order is consistent with a system in which prisoners’ organs are plentiful, immediately available and blood-matched in advance. That is, prisoners who are waiting for death at the surgeon’s convenience.

Prolific transplanter

Huang is not the only senior figure in China’s transplant system who came under fire last week. Professor Mario Mondelli, editor of the journal Liver International, announced the retraction of a paper by Chinese authors on the grounds that they could not provide evidence that the organs used in their research were from volunteer donors.



The authors claimed that no organs from executed prisoners were used, but when challenged by three academics (including me, as part of my work with the International Coalition to End Organ Pillaging in China), they were unable to provide any such proof.

The senior author on this paper is Zheng Shusen, one of the most prominent transplant surgeons in China. He is an academician in the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of Zhejiang Medical University’s First Affiliated Hospital, where he is a chief surgeon specialising in liver transplantation.

Since 2001, he has been the founding director of the hospital’s multi-organ transplant centre, affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Health. In addition, Zheng is vice-president of the China Medical Association, editor-in-chief of the Chinese Journal of Organ Transplantation, and former president of the Chinese Society of Transplantation.

As an architect of China’s transplant system, Zheng’s accomplishments in liver transplantation are impressive. On January 28 2005, Zheng and his surgical group performed five liver transplants in a single day and a total of 11 that week.

Zheng has also written a paper about performing 46 emergency liver transplants, between January 2000 and December 2004. Rather than spending time on a waiting list, these patients received their new livers within one to three days of arriving at the hospital. That again suggests a plentiful supply of organs at short notice.

Zheng’s own hospital website notes that he has been the leading surgeon in 1,957 liver transplant surgeries.

Reputational damage

Zheng’s prolific transplant activity reflects a system with plenty of available livers. In contrast, doctors in the West struggle with a shortage of donated organs.

One clue about this abundant supply of livers may lie in one of Zheng’s less-known roles. Since 2007, he has been chairman of the Zhejiang Anti-Cult Association.

The association is the provincial branch of the national agency, known as the China Anti-Cult Association (CACA). This was established in 2000 by the Chinese Communist Party to create propaganda vilifying Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual practice. CACA devises methods of forcible ideological conversion of Falun Gong practitioners.

As the head of the provincial Anti-Cult Association, Zheng is responsible for agitation, incitement and propaganda against Falun Gong in Zhejiang, a province of 54 million people. References online show him heading political study sessions inciting hatred against Falun Gong and training Communist Party members in “anti-cult” work.

These activities seem to go hand in hand with Zheng’s successes in the transplant field. His 2008 Hangzhou Criteria revised patients’ eligibility for liver transplant based on carcinoma size. The new criteria expanded the pool of potential liver recipients in China by 52%.

This was in spite of recent judicial reform that caused death row sentences to plummet in the country, and suggests there’s an abundant source of non-death-row organs available.

Now, the reputations of two of China’s most senior figures in transplantation are under question: Zheng for his false claims that no organs from executed prisoners were used in his research, and the revelation of his “anti-cult” alter ego. And Huang for again showing that there is no genuine change in organ harvesting and transplantation practice in the country.

International authorities should demand a full account of the real sources of organs in China before believing any more claims about reform.

Acknowledgement: Matthew Robertson, an independent China researcher and translator based in New York City, co-authored this article.

Wendy Rogers, Professor in Clinical Ethics, Macquarie University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How we discovered the vampire bats that have learned to drink human blood

Doesn’t look like much of a threat, does he?
Gerry Carter/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

What’s for dinner? For some Brazilian vampire bats, these days it’s human blood.

That’s the surprising outcome of my research, recently published in the Acta Chiropterologica journal, which revealed that the hairy-legged vampire bat of Pernambuco, Brazil, has developed an appetite for human blood over that of other possible prey.

This finding upends all the existing scientific literature on this bat species, which typically feeds on bird blood.

A little-known bat (with a secret)

The hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata) is the least-studied of the three species of known vampire bats. In 20 years working as a zoologist, I had never held a live specimen in my hands.

But there I was in Pernambuco’s drylands in 2013, inside a cave in the Catimbau National Park, when I focused the flashlight on a little colony of bats above my head and spotted a few Diphylla.

Though not the prettiest species of bat, they are more delicate than some, with a gentle face, small ears and, I must say, a soft look.

On the ground below the bats, I saw pools of guano, or bat droppings, each the size of a soup dish. Vampire bats are hematophagous, meaning they can only eat blood, so their excrement is tinged red.

View of Catimbau National Park, where some bats are starting to change their feeding habits.
Enrico Bernard/UFPE, Author provided

Diphylla prey on bird blood, but in Catimbau Park, native birds of medium and large size have become locally extinct. Probably due to unregulated hunting, the white-browed guan, the yellow-legged tinamou, and the picazuro pigeon — all potential prey for Diphylla in the past — were no longer observed there by 2013.

So what were those Diphylla feeding on, if not birds? Goat blood might make sense. I had seen many grazing in the park, raised by the hundreds of families who still live in Catimbau, despite its legal status as a natural protection zone.

I returned to the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, determined to investigate Diphylla’_s_ diet.

The scientific method

Extracting DNA from vampire-bat guano is no small feat. Proteins in their digestive tracts can break down the DNA of the blood consumed, and samples collected in caves can be contaminated with exogenous DNA, either from other organisms in the guano (such as bacteria, fungi and insects) or by the sample collector.

For this task I joined forces with Fernanda Ito, then an UFPE student working toward her undergraduate honours thesis. She liked the idea of using fecal DNA to figure out the bats’ prey as her thesis project. Later our team welcomed Rodrigo Torres, from UFPE’s Department of Zoology, who works with genetics applied to biodiversity conservation.

If all went well, the sequences we obtained would be compared to those deposited in GenBank, indicating the possible prey Diphylla were feeding on.

The process of extracting and purifying the DNA was as long and dramatic as a Brazilian soap opera. For days, Fernanda persistently tested and modified protocols at various temperatures and lengths of time, until finding the right combination that would allow the perfect reaction to happen.

Finally, when Fernanda was on the verge of quitting in frustration, she managed to sequence the samples. When we compared our bat DNA sequences with those obtained from goats, pigs, cows, dogs, chickens and humans, we found that Diphylla had consumed blood from chickens and humans.

Researcher installing monitoring equipment in a cave in Brazil’s Catimbau National Park.
Eder Barbier, Author provided

At least three samples obtained on different dates pointed to the consumption of human blood. The other 12 of our 15 samples found evidence of Diphylla sucking chickens’ blood.

This was an intriguing finding. Science suggests that Diphylla would never consume human blood. Indeed, three articles (from Mexico in 1966 and 1981 and from Brazil in 1994) even indicated that in captivity, Diphylla would rather starve to death than feed on blood from cows, rats, rabbits, pigs or live goats.

Groundbreaking data

Our data was contrary to all the information available on Diphylla so far. In fact, we had seen reports that indicated that this species actually has a physiological intolerance of mammalian blood, which has more dry matter, mainly proteins, than bird blood (which contains more water and fat).

Diphylla ecaudata.
Eder Barbier, Author provided

That would explain why the bats weren’t going after the goats, as I had originally thought. But how to explain the strange preference for human blood?

It seems the scarcity of native large bird species in the park has led Diphylla to develop a more flexible diet than scientists could have imagined. That may be good for Diphylla’s survival, but it’s also an indicator that the area we studied is not faring well. In northeastern Brazil’s dry forests, native species are disappearing, presumably forcing other species, too, to change their diet and behaviour.

The presence of human blood in bat guano also raises public health issues. Clearly, some people in the Catimbau region are being bitten by bats, raising the risk that rabies and other diseases could be transmitted.

On the positive side, Fernanda defended her thesis with success and our article in Acta Chiropterologica is attracting media coverage worldwide.

Discovering that bats can learn to live on human blood has given me several new ideas to explore, such as radio-tracking them to find their human prey.

New research will start soon. Now, I just have to find a new Fernanda …

Enrico Bernard, Departamento de Zoologia, Centro de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Explainer: what is ballistic missile defence – and would it stop a missile from North Korea?

The US and several of its allies currently deploy several ballistic missile defence systems that would be used in the event North Korea actually launched an attack.
Reuters/KCNA

North Korea’s test this week of an intercontinental ballistic missile has reignited interest and debate on the feasibility of ballistic missile defence systems, and whether countries such as Australia should seek to acquire them.

But what are these systems, and how do they work? How effective would they be in providing a defence against a potential missile attack?

How do they work?

All ballistic missile defence systems consist of a network of tracking and guidance radars, and the interceptor launchers.

On detecting a ballistic missile launch, the radars track the missile’s trajectory, fire an interceptor to shoot it down, and prepare further interceptors to be launched if the first one misses.

This is referred to as a “shoot-look-shoot” strategy, as opposed to a strategy of saturation – where the defender simply shoots as many interceptors as possible in the hope of achieving a kill.

Modern defence systems use interceptor missiles carrying kinetic kill vehicles. These are warheads that are non-explosive and designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles by simply crashing into them.

All of the systems mentioned below are intended to work in conjunction with one another. They are integrated to provide the ability to shoot down ballistic missiles throughout their flight path. However, they are also capable of operating independently, although with less effectiveness than if operated in conjunction with other systems.

Missile defence systems in the region

The US and its allies in the Asia-Pacific currently deploy several ballistic missile defence systems. These would be used in the unlikely event that North Korea decided to actually launch a ballistic missile attack.

The first and most prominent is Terminal High Altitude Area Defence, or THAAD, which the US has deployed in South Korea. THAAD is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of flight – that is, as the ballistic missile is re-entering the atmosphere to strike its target.

The second relevant system is Patriot PAC-3, which is designed to provide late terminal phase interception – that is, after the missile has re-entered the atmosphere. It is deployed by US forces operating in the region, as well as Japan.

THAAD and Patriot PAC-3 interceptors at work.

Perhaps the most capable system currently in operation in the region is the Aegis naval system, which is deployed on US and Japanese destroyers. It is designed to intercept ballistic missiles in the mid-course phase of flight – that is, when the missile is outside of earth’s atmosphere and transiting to its target.

The Aegis system in action.

What all of these systems have in common is they are theatre ballistic missile defence systems, designed to provide protection against short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as the one tested by North Korea this week, fly too high and fast for these systems to engage with.

Aegis has demonstrated some limited capability to engage targets similar to intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was used to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite in 2008, but has never been tested against an actual intercontinental ballistic missile target.

The only system expressly designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles is the US Ground-based Midcourse Defence. However, this has a very patchy record in testing. By the end of 2017 it will only have 44 interceptors deployed.

How effective are they?

None of these systems is 100% effective, and most have an iffy record in testing. Aegis has succeeded in 35 out of 42 tests, while Ground-based Midcourse Defence has had only ten successes in 18 tests. However, THAAD has been successful in 18 out of 18 tests.

Tests are conducted in favourable conditions – and it is reasonable to expect the success rates to be lower in actual combat use.

The true difficulty lies with intercontinental ballistic missiles. An intercontinental ballistic missile can attain altitudes well in excess of low earth orbit. Those fired on a typical long-range trajectory can exceed 1,200km in altitude. The high-trajectory, short-range test shot North Korea conducted this week attained an altitude of 2,700km.

By way of comparison, the International Space Station orbits at an altitude of around 400km.

However, the altitude intercontinental ballistic missiles attain is only part of the problem. The other major challenge facing ballistic missile defence is the truly enormous speeds that missiles attain during the terminal phase. They often hit or exceed 20 times the speed of sound.

A common comparison used is that ballistic missile defence is akin to shooting a bullet in flight with another bullet. The reality is even more extreme.

For example, a .300 Winchester Magnum (a high-velocity hunting and sniper round) can achieve a velocity of 2,950 feet per second as it leaves the barrel. This equates to 3,237km/h, or 2.62 times the speed of sound. An intercontinental ballistic missile can achieve speeds almost eight times faster than this. As a result, it is almost impossible to reliably defend against such missiles.

This is not necessarily a problem for countries such as Japan and South Korea. Any ballistic missile used by North Korea against them would be a shorter-range ballistic missile that these systems could engage.

However, countries should be mindful that these systems provide limited-to-no capability to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles. In Australia’s case, the only missiles capable of reaching this far from North Korea are intercontinental ballistic missiles. Thus, even if Australia decided to invest in ballistic missile defence, it would provide little-to-no protection from a potential North Korean nuclear attack.

James Dwyer, Teaching Fellow and PhD Candidate, Politics and International Relations Program, University of Tasmania
Read the original article.

ANC policy conference: deeper polarisation and a stalemate for South Africa

President Jacob Zuma at the opening of the ANC’s 5th national policy conference in Johannesburg.
EPA/Stringer

South Africa’s governing African National Congress’s previous four policy conferences have given a very good indication of what the policy resolutions will be at the national conferences that follow. As a result it was possible to anticipate whether changes in policies or continuity would characterise the next five years, several months before the final conference.

Can the same be expected of the ANC’s 5th policy conference?.

The ANC’s National Conference, held every five years, is its highest decision-making body in terms of electing its leaders and adopting policies. A policy conference is held a few months before the national conference to prepare draft policy resolutions after extensive debates.

Traditionally, ANC policy conferences have been dominated by economic policy matters. More recently the issue of organisational renewal has also taken centre stage. At the last two National Conferences (2007, 2012) two sets of candidates (“slates”) dominated the proceedings. The result is that policy matters have increasingly become shorthand – or soundbites – for support for different candidates.

In 2007 then president Thabo Mbeki was regarded as neo-liberal and Jacob Zuma as pro-poor and pro-workers. The same applies this year: radical economic transformation – or white monopoly capital – is a code for Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who President Zuma prefers to succeed him. The code for supporters of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa is state capture, an inclusive economy and radical socio-economic transformation.

What this means as one analyses the essence of the 2017 policy conference is that focus is no longer primarily on policy. Rather it’s on policy as a means towards a political end – succession.

Challenges facing ANC and South Africa

The boycott by the ANC stalwarts and veterans and the Umkhonto we Sizwe Council overshadowed the first conference days. President Zuma’s opening speech defiantly delegitimised their call for a consultative conference. (The ANC held national consultative conferences only three times in its history, in 1962, 1969 and 1985 while it was banned and mainly in exile at critical stages in its history to resolve important issues). Zuma also challenged his opponents in the ANC and accused them of being responsible for factionalism in the party and its organisational malaise.

ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe, on the other hand, tabled a controversial diagnostic organisational report which could not be suppressed by Zuma’s supporters. The first part of the proceedings was therefore at best a quasi-consultative conference with no tangible results but rather posturing by the two main blocs in the ANC.

ANC and South African presidential hopefuls Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.
Siphiwe Sibeko

Nine discussion documents have been published as the basis of the policy discussions. Do they present an accurate picture of the state of the nation and the policy remedies South Africans expect?

The issues that the ANC as government has to address are well-known but often clouded in managerial jargon. One can reduce them to three overarching challenges.

The ANC is, firstly, engulfed in a crisis of credibility and integrity – even one of legitimacy despite its electoral majority. Unethical governance, egoistic tendencies and a decline in the ethos of service provision are all contributing factors. The policy conference’s organisation renewal mandate is therefore of paramount importance.

Secondly, the ANC has to engage directly with the economic downward spiral – the current recession, credit downgrading and low foreign direct investment. South Africa is also increasingly in competition with new African and other emerging markets. The domestic economy relies on mining as its primary source of foreign currency earnings while its contribution to the GDP continues a long pattern of decline. Agriculture too has been a major source of job creation. But that too is in decline. South Africa’s economy is changing while government policies aren’t keeping abreast.

Thirdly, a social crisis characterised by inequality, unemployment, family dysfunctionality, crime and drug abuse appears to have entered a vicious circle without effective government counter strategies. The gap between rural and urban life experiences is widening while the ANC’s panacea for it – namely land ownership – has not yet produced tangible results.

What do South Africans expect of the ANC and has the conference engaged with these ideals? In a generalised and simplified form, South Africans want to trust the public domain and want to see moral leadership. They want to have hope for the future and are willing to work together even under difficult circumstances. The Mandela era galvanised national pride and South Africans want to return to that. They also want to see a society based on fairness and with democracy that delivers positive results for them.

The ANC’s slogan of “a better life for all” does reflect some of these ideals. The National Development Plan (NDP) in principle also endorsed them. But the devil is in the detail. Both the NDP and the ANC’s strategy and tactics document tabled at the conference depend on a “developmental state” for implementation. The developmental state (as represented by post-war Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and others) is therefore the cornerstone of the ANC’s approach.

But it’s premised on a public sector with strong human and governance capacity as well as widespread consensus on how private-public partnerships can be used to stimulate and coordinate the economy. It also requires consensus on national priorities.

These premises are weak in South Africa and a policy conference is meant to address them.

Shortcomings

The main shortcomings in the ANC’s approach to policy are twofold. The first is that it concentrates almost exclusively on policy objectives but very little on policy strategies: how to achieve them; how to manage and coordinate policies. Government officials are often without a policy roadmap.

The second is that the ANC’s historical legacy places on limits its policy imagination. “Colonialism of a special type” is still the point of departure of the latest strategy and tactics document. A neo-colonial form of it is contemplated but even this makes exploration of options beyond its confines very difficult. At the same time socio-economic conditions in South Africa are changing radically. This includes urbanisation and the growth of the black middle class.

The National Policy Conference hasn’t recommended significant policy changes. The leadership changes in December 2017 might herald new policies. But this policy conference doesn’t provide South Africans with any basis of what might be possible. It has been too preoccupied with leadership succession.

The outcome is probably a deeper polarisation within the ANC and a consolidation of “two ANCs” with no pivotal decision making centre. This effectively amounts to a stalemate. This will be experienced in both the NEC and the national cabinet.

The National Conference is the only remaining constitutional mechanism that can make a difference. But the 18 months after December and before the 2019 general election might be too short to rescue the ANC.

Dirk Kotze, Professor in Political Science, University of South Africa

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa's problems lie in political negligence, not its Constitution

Many are questioning South Africa’s constitutional democracy amid high poverty and unemployment.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings

South Africa is witnessing another wave of disillusionment with the constitutional arrangement that followed the end of apartheid in 1994. As the country advances towards the third decade of democracy the sentiment is that the constitution is an obstacle to meaningful economic transformation. It’s roundly criticised for putting a brake on much needed wealth redistribution, following centuries of colonialism and apartheid oppression of the black majority.

President Jacob Zuma has even alluded to the need to amend the constitution to enable accelerated radical land reform.

Why, indeed, has the country not made the kinds of social and economic advances that were promised in the negotiated settlement and incorporated in the 1996 constitution?

South Africa’s constitution is admired globally. It incorporates hard fought for political and civil rights, and a generous range of social and economic rights that can be enforced by courts. Why then do so many South Africans, mostly black, still live amid widespread poverty? Why do they continue to live in segregated spaces that reinforce apartheid geography?

With a constitution locating equality and dignity as its preeminent principle, why do so many women and children still suffer from such disturbing levels of violence? Why is unemployment so alarmingly high in the face of vivid affluence and consumerism?

These questions go to the heart of the South African dilemma, namely, persistent economic inequalities and poverty. Some even perceive this as the failure of the South African constitutional project.

But has the constitutional project failed? And is the country’s constitution the problem? I believe not. The provisions in the constitution, if properly implemented and enforced, have the capacity to change the lives of the majority of South Africans.

What’s failed

There are many reasons for the country’s inability to realise the rights set out on the constitution. They include a lack of political will on the part of all spheres of government (national, provincial, and local), bureaucratic indifference or incompetence, corruption and mismanagement.

Other problems concern either ineptitude of the so-called Chapter 9 institutions, established to strengthen the country’s constitutional democracy, including the Human Rights Commission and the Gender Commission. And the failure of government to implement their recommendations.

The reasons also relate to the failure of government to implement court decisions.

But a narrow focus on only law and the courts will yield only limited results and constrict the transformative possibilities of the constitution.

The ability of the constitution to change the lives of the majority of South Africans is particularly true if enforcement involves a broad spectrum of societal actors. This includes government, the corporate community and civil society, the media and the various professions, the trade union movement and religious bodies.

The range of social and economic rights in the constitution include the right of access to education, health care, food, water, social security, a clean environment and housing. Many have been litigated, often with judgements in favour of the applicants. But often the judgements haven’t been properly been implemented and enforced.

The most successful cases have been those where the plaintiffs have worked closely with civil society advocates to ensure that the court’s decision is implemented. A good example is the Treatment Action Campaign case that forced government to roll out anti-retroviral medication to HIV positive pregnant women in public hospitals.

The property hot potato

Arguably the land question is the most pertinent in South Africa. Not surprisingly the section of the constitution that’s viewed as the greatest impediment to “radical” economic transformation is Section 25 – the so-called property section.

The right to property ownership is often seen as protecting the interests of white property owners over poor black South Africans. Is this fair?

I don’t believe so.

The protection of the right to property should protect everyone in a market economy. And most people want their property protected. But these protections don’t preclude the possibility of addressing the colonial and apartheid legacy of land theft from black South Africans.

Grinding poverty is forcing many young South Africans into scavenging.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

Section 25 allows for land to be expropriated for a public purpose or in the public interest. The definition of public interest includes “the nation’s commitment to land reform and to bring about equitable access to all SA’s natural resources”. The clause sets out the terms (“just and equitable”) for compensating owners of land earmarked for expropriation. Most significantly, Section 25 provides that

property is not limited to land.

Section 25 also provides for land reform through restitution and redistribution. It does this by enabling “a person or community whose tenure of land is insecure as a result of past racially discriminatory laws or practices” to tenure that is legally secure, or of comparable redress, as provided for in legislation.

In addition, government is mandated to take affirmative action, within its available resources, to

foster conditions which enable citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis.

These provisions create great possibility for addressing land shortage, security of tenure and other deprivations as a result of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history.

Failure to act

That successive South African governments have clearly not implemented the provisions of section 25 shows political negligence, a betrayal of its own policies and a failure of governance.

Section 25 provides government with a clear directive that must be matched with a solid commitment to act. Section 237 of the constitution directs that “all constitutional obligations must be performed diligently and without delay”.

The government clearly has not satisfied its constitutional obligations – and must do so with substantive thought and with urgency.

The Constitutional Court has on several occasions heeded the government to take action. For example, in the Tongoane case in 2010 Justice Ngcobo noted the priority that land restitution and security of tenure must be given. He noted:

We are mindful that Parliament’s legislative plate is overflowing. These matters, have, however now become pressing and should be treated with the urgency that they deserve.

In light of government’s failure to fulfil its side of the bargain, it would be foolhardy to consider amending the constitution without considering the findings of the Motlanthe Commission. Set up by the National Assembly, the commission will investigate the impact of key laws passed by the South African parliament since 1994 with a special focus on eradicating economic inequality. It could provide a blueprint for government action if, as expected, it sets out recommendations on social and economic rights, including land.

While the untold misery and deep humiliation that people endured under colonialism and apartheid cannot be fully compensated, they may have their rights to dignity and equality restored through government laws and other actions. If government doesn’t act, then civil society actors and key institutions should consider interventions that may force its hand.

It’s not the constitution’s failure to deliver “radical economic” transformation, but a lacklustre government that has forgotten its promises – first adopted in the Freedom Charter and then again in the constitution.

Penelope Andrews, Dean of Law and Professor, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.