While hailing judgement giving clarity to status of temporal employees in relation to companies and labour brokers, delegates expressed concern continued deaths in the mines. They were also concerned about the tendency by corporates to opt for paying fines ‘to feed their prize-fixing practices’ instead of complying with the law.
University of Johannesburg's Professor Chris Landsberg said the issue facing countries in the continent, including South Africa, needed to be properly framed. ‘
"The question’, said Landsberg, "is not corporate capture. It it is the corporate capture of the state to serve private interests at the expense of the public purse to greater negative impact on citizens through corruption," he said.

Responding to Landsberg’s address, chairperson of the Congolese Diaspora for the Nelson Mandela Legacy, Frank Assimbo,  decried the marked absence of business which he accused "as buyers and sellers of corruption to enable corporate capture of the state rendering Congo a failed rotten state".   

Assimbo said human rights were well known ‘but  are not enforceable to uphold human dignity of the people because leaders are rotten".
"They talk peace but wage war to make money and Congo has become a victim of the very people in charge of the country," Assimbo said.
The workshop also explored whether South Africa’s legal and policy framework was adequate to deal with obstacles experienced in holding the corporate sector, the State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and government institutions accountable.

To bring the matter closer to home, discussions also explored whether South Africa needed its own ‘Magnitsky Law’ to effect corporate accountability.
The Magnitsky Act derived its name from a Russian tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison for exposing a US$250 million fraud. In 2016, the US Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act in his name to punish Russian officials responsible for his death.

In 2016, the United States enacted the Global Magnitsky Act allowing for the sanctioning of foreign government officials implicated in Human Rights violations anywhere in the world. This entailed freezing assets of offenders and denying them entrance in the signing country.
Other countries that have  enacted their own versions of the Magnitsky Act, to hold officials implicated in human rights violations accountable, include Canada, Lithuania, Estonia and the United Kingdom. In South Africa,  the process is yet to gather noticeable momentum.
Some of the delegates who attended the conference were from Black Sash, Corruption Watch, South African Human Rights Commission, Bench Marks Foundation and Departments of Justice and Constitutional Development as well as the department of International Relations and Co-operation.

Source: IOL