Judgement reserved in UP language policy case

The Northern Gauteng High Court on Thursday reserved judgment in the case brought by AfriForum‚ AfriForum Youth and Solidarity against the decision of the University of Pretoria (UP) to phase out Afrikaans as medium of instruction from 2017.

Although two days had been reserved for the hearing‚ one had proven sufficient for the argument to be heard‚ AfriForum said. Commenting on the court decision‚ AfriForum deputy CEO Alana Bailey said that in the opinion of AfriForum‚ AfriForum Youth and Solidarity‚ the UP’s 2017 language policy amounted to a gross violation of the constitutional rights of Afrikaans students.

“The organisations will therefore take all possible steps to protect and maintain the right of Afrikaans students to study in their mother tongue. They have already won a similar case against the management of the University of the Free State earlier this year.

“The case not only applies to the recognition of the rights of Afrikaans students‚ but to the protection of the principles of the right to mother-tongue education and multilingualism‚ versus monolingual English education‚ which is increasingly being enforced on South Africans by public institutions at the cost of the mother languages of more than 90% of the country’s residents‚” Bailey said.