Maverick Citizen: Faranaaz Veriava: Always ready to take on the good fight

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Fighting the good fights starts with foregrounding values that matter and then having the empathy that gets adversaries even to change their minds. Human rights lawyer Faranaaz Veriava strives to hit this mark.

Our roots plug into the soil of our origin stories, deep into the fertile grounds of heritage, family and values – the ones we keep and the ones we eventually show the middle finger to.

Together with Equal Education, SECTION27 brought and won a legal challenge in July to compel the Department of Basic Education to continue with the Schools Nutrition programme suspended during Covid-19 lockdown. Government’s decision came with the shameful cost of thousands of children going hungry. “I want my boys to understand that who they are in the world does not necessarily make them better, and if they’re better at some things it’s because they’ve had different opportunities,” she says.

Being an outsider though was a super power of perspective. She could get over “needing to pray five times a day to fit in with my Muslim friends at school”. She would also grow to recognise complexity and shortcomings in her parents and the adults in her family. They were the imperfectly perfect of just being human, heroes too to her.

She says: “We got together in that magical year of 1994. We believed in the same politics and values of a non-racist and non-sexist world. Maybe we were naïve thinking we were going to change the world.” The fight for her is still about upholding values that build a strong state; one that delivers better quality public services. It’s also to push back against the erosion of civil liberties and human rights. She keeps telling this to her boys Adam and Reza , the law students she teaches and SECTION27 research interns she mentors.

 

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