Sowetan

COURT SLAMS TUT’S STUDENT EVICTIONS

Judge refuses ‘blanket ban’ on ejections

- Bongani Nkosi nkosib@sowetan.co.za

IT IS unacceptab­le for a university to give students just a few hours to vacate their residences and then throw them out by force during campus protests.

This is what management of the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) has been told in a judgment delivered at the North Gauteng High Court yesterday.

Judge Susan Wentzel also rapped TUT over the knuckles for kicking students out without an eviction order during protests over a lack of state loan scheme funds in September 2014.

She delivered her judgment in one of several applicatio­ns to the court by TUT and the NGO Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR). The two have been waging legal battles against each other since the fateful evictions in 2014.

Judgment is still expected in an applicatio­n where LHR wants then vice-chancellor Nthabiseng Ogude and two other officials held in contempt of court for ignoring an order that they should allow students back to residences.

Wentzel’s ruling yesterday comes at a time #FeesMustFa­ll protests have erupted at a number of universiti­es.

Universiti­es could consider closing campuses and residences, and forcing students to go back home.

TUT kicked out students from their campus residences during protests Wentzel described as violent.

“During these protests, buildings were destroyed, cars were torched and students were intimidate­d by militant students leading the protests,” she wrote in the judgment.

Wentzel said while she accepted that the violence required that urgent measures be taken, hounding students out unlawfully was wrong.

“It did not account for the fact that the students were not given sufficient notice of the need to evacuate them so that they could make alternativ­e arrangemen­ts.

“And, even in the event of an emergency, the students did not have to be manhandled out of the residences without the opportunit­y to collect their belongings.

“All in all, I believe that the ‘evacuation’, if that is what it was, was badly handled without due regard, in particular, to those students who had not been involved in the protests or the violence.

“Even those who had been involved in the violence could not simply be summarily told to evacuate the residences on but a few hours notice.

“The fact that they did not have ‘clean hands’ did not entitle [TUT] to take the law into its own hands.”

Though ruling against TUT and ordering it pay all legal costs, Wentzel decided against granting LHR an interdict that bars the university from evicting students in future. “I am not prepared to grant a blanket interdict,” Wentzel said.

“The students did not have to be manhandled out of the residences

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