The application of the doctrine of proportionality in South African courts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can constitutional rights be limited where there is a functioning democracy and the rule of law? It has become generally accepted that limitations on constitutional rights generated by statutory or common law in democracies are constitutionally permissible if the principle of proportionality is applied. Succinctly put, in functioning democracies the constitutionality of such limitations are determined by proportionality. In practice the principle of proportionality is a safeguard for the individual, over and above traditional methods of controlling the state's administration. It involves a balancing act between the competing interests and objectives of the state and the interests of the individual and embodies a sense of an appropriate relationship between the ends and the means of state action. Proportionality demands that when an individual's rights are affected or threatened by state action, only such action shall be countenanced which is suitable, necessary and not out of proportion to the gains to the community. Proportionality can thus be seen to be a synonym for reasonableness. The birthplace of proportionality is Germany, from whence it has migrated into many countries and legal systems. It migrated to various Western European states, to Canada, to England, to New Zealand, to Australia, to South Africa, to Israel, to Central and Eastern Europe, to Asian and to South American states. Prior to setting out the impact of the doctrine of proportionality on South African courts two jurisdictions will be examined. First, the jurisdiction of Germany as it is the jurisdiction where the proportionality doctrine had its origin and early development. Secondly, Canada, due to the fact that the limitation clause in South Africa's 1993 Interim Constitution and 1996 Constitution has been so heavily influenced by the general limitation clause (art 1) of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the interpretation of that clause by the Canadian Supreme Court.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".