Property rights The right to hold and own property, and protection against arbitrary deprivation of one’s property, are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in most constitutions. Rightly so, because there is a clear link between strongly entrenched property rights and economic development. Nevertheless property rights cannot be absolute because private property may have to be taken for public purposes (for example, building roads), and a country’s constitution must take this into account, usually by requiring any such taking to be procedurally fair and to be accompanied by adequate compensation. Our new constitution must tackle three additional problems: • What to do about the commercial farmers whose land was seized in the previous government’s resettlement programme? The farmers have not yet been compensated for their losses. • What to do about people who are not using farmland productively? Should the law allow them to be dispossessed? More generally, to what extent should the law control the ways in which people use and dispose of their own property? • How can the sometimes antagonistic rights of miners and farmers be reconciled? Rights of women and children Women and children should be given special protection in a new constitution, because they are particularly vulnerable. It is not enough, for example, merely to state that discrimination against women is prohibited: they need to be encouraged to take their equal place in society. Social, economic and cultural rights Some of these rights should be included in the Declaration of Rights in the new constitution, because of the economic gulf between the élite [who don’t need special protection] and the vast majority [who do]. The rights which are essential to the maintenance of a reasonable standard of living are: • the right to basic health care; • the right to fair and safe working conditions, including the right to join a trade union and the right to take industrial action; • the right to free education, at least to primary level, because an educated workforce is the key to economic growth; • the right to adequate food and clean water. No government of a properlyfunctioning modern State can allow its people to starve or to suffer from inadequate or polluted water supplies. • The right to housing and shelter. It must be made clear in the Declaration of Rights that the government is responsible for assuring these rights. Even if the fulfilment of these rights is dependent on the government having adequate resources – the rights are not meaningless because the government is obliged to make resources available if it possible to do so. If a government wastes its resources providing luxury vehicles and housing for ministers and other officials it would be open to aggrieved citizens to sue the government and demand a responsible allocation of resources. 23