Prof Wessel Le Roux - University of the Western Cape, Professor

In this paper he will be investigating the pragmatic, strategic and principled reasons rights which motivated the drafters of the 1994 Constitution to include resident non-citizens (or denizens) as active participants in the post-apartheid constitution-making processes. As a matter of principle, he argues that it is the figure of foreign national, silhouetted against the rising sun in Stoddart's famous picture, that captures the true essence of the civic identity that constitutionalism promises post-conflict societies ( or what Habermas at the time called constitutional patriotism. From this perspective, the subsequent abolition of non-citizen voting rights in South Africa has opened the future of post-apartheid constitutional project to the risk of populist identity politics.

About Prof Wessel Le Roux
Wessel le Roux is Professor in Public law at the University of the Western Cape where he teaches courses in legal and constitutional interpretation and immigration law. He obtained his BLC LLB (cum laude) at the University of Pretoria in 1988 and his LLD from the same University in 2003. He taught for 12 years at Unisa where he was the Head of the VerLoren van Themaat Centre for Public Law Studies before moving to the Western Cape in 2011.