Seychelles

What does the tale of an on-again, off-again, children’s day-care centre in Seychelles have to say to readers from other legal jurisdictions? The case is apparently about how a court might approach what seems to be a valid lease that the government appears desperate to cancel. While that sounds unexceptional, here’s the catch: there are suggestions that the original deal to award the lease might have been finalised as a political favour and the government, caught out by the opposition, wanted to renege on the deal so as not to appear corrupt.

Statelessness, once a ‘forgotten human rights crisis’, has been put at the forefront of a global agenda with the UN’s #Ibelong campaign. Among the most tragic victims of statelessness are children found abandoned in a state and who, in most Southern African states, would as a result never have any nationality. Condemned to a life in a limbo that extends even to their adult years, and that may even be inherited by their children, these stateless persons illustrate how essential the right to nationality is to every person.

Supreme Court judge, Ronny Govinden, has been appointed as Chief Justice of Seychelles and was sworn in on November 9.