The need for clarity on whether 'suspects' may rely on section 35 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 : a comparative law analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines whether the police have a constitutional duty to inform 'suspects' about their fundamental rights, despite the fact that section 35 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, is silent on this issue. The decisions of the different divisions of the South African High Court diverge on this question, and the Constitutional Court has not yet had the opportunity to settle it. In an attempt to resolve this question, this article considers the underlying principles of binding and non-binding international law standards, as well as how this is approached in the Canadian and United States' jurisdictions. This analysis reveals that an emerging consensus of opinion is developing which suggests that the informational duties should arise from the moment the police embark on an adversarial relationship with suspects, by approaching them to establish or disprove the existence of evidence linking them to a crime. The author concludes that such an approach accords with a contextual and purposive interpretation, and should be embraced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".