Gender Equality & Religious Family Laws in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa has a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in which various communities live according to their own customs and usages. At present the law of South Africa generally does not recognize the validity of some of these customs and usages as law. The result is that adherents to religious legal systems live under state law in the public sphere, which is the common law and, with regard to their private life, according to non-state law, which is religious customs and usages. This article deals with the consequences of non-recognition of religious family laws in South Africa and, especially, its effect on the legal status of women adhering to certain religious legal systems within the new constitutional dispensation of South Africa.