Igualdad y no discriminación

In 2002/2003, as the city of Bogota began the process of privatizing its waste collection services, recycling organizations in Bogota attempted to participate in a bidding process to compete for a waste collection and transportation contracts with the city. The recyclers were de jure precluded from competing for these contracts in big cities because they were not equity-owned, “share held corporations” as required by the law for public procurement, but rather, non-profit cooperatives of informal working poor.

Recycling activities in Colombia have traditionally been carried out by extremely poor and marginalized sectors of society, who collect materials from landfills or inorganic waste from the streets to transport and sell them as recyclable material to intermediary informal warehouses of the national and multinational industry from refuse deposited on the street and sell it to warehouses for modest sums.

The petition in this public interest litigation (PIL) case cited data from the States of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Maharashtra, regarding government practices regarding female sterilization, which lacked counseling or informed consent, lacked pre- and post-operative care, and included unhygienic and un-anesthetized operating conditions, sterilization of minors, coercion and cruelty.  The PIL requested the Court to direct the state governments to comply with the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Guidelines on Standards of Female Sterilization, enacted in October 1999 (“the Guidelines”).

This case concerns a 2009 appeal before the Constitutional Court of South Africa, brought by the Head of the Mpumalanga Department of Education (HoD).