Sasha Stevenson: Using the law to fight for social justice

Blingy things and trinkets may be some people’s idea of treasure. For Sasha Stevenson though, treasure is also her drawer filled with T-shirts. 

They’re protest T-shirts – cheaply printed, mass-produced and in sizes that maybe don’t fit properly. But they are a cherished uniform of solidarity, a statement of intent in fabric. It’s about having skin in the game in her fight to uphold rights, making demands heard and her commitment to staying the course for struggles that aren’t over yet. 

Stevenson leads the health rights programme at SECTION27, the public interest law centre that celebrated its tenth year this year. She joined the organisation in 2012 after leaving a job in corporate law. 

The corporate space was good training though, she says. It helped her see that there are networks and allies that can be found in unexpected places and that people can work across sectors. There was the odd fun perk too, she says, like “the fancy year-end dinners”. But in high school already she knew human rights law was going to be more her thing than climbing the ladder of corporate law. 

“The Constitution was quite new when I was in high school and there were all these debates at the time about the death penalty, abortion and gay adoption – fundamental human rights questions. I was drawn to the law as a useful tool to push social justice forward,” she says, of growing up in a post-apartheid South Africa. Stevenson was born in the United Kingdom to South African parents. The family returned to South Africa after the referendum of 1992. 

She clerked at the Constitutional Court for the chief justice, who at the time was Chief Justice Pius Langa. She then became a researcher at the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court before doing a Master of Law at Cambridge University. 

Back in South Africa and starting at SECTION27, her first week in the job involved going to court on the matter of the Limpopo textbook crisis. This was a fight to get the Department of Basic Education to deliver on ensuring every child in the province had every book they needed to learn. The cases came thick and fast in the next few months, including a fight for people in Eastern Cape who were not getting access to medicines because the Mthatha medical depot had been the target of arson attacks, theft and stock management disasters.  

It was a baptism by fire, but exactly the burning centre she wanted to step into. Law, advocacy and strategic campaigning, she was finding out, did have exquisite power to stop corruption and human rights abuses and to raise the alarm against government apathy, incompetence and impunity. She also earned her first “SECTION27 Activist” T-shirt!

“It was really exciting for me those first few months because I got to see what this organisation was doing and I got to work on fundamental cases,” she says. 

Now eight years in, Stevenson is maybe less filled with the excited flush of a newbie on the job, but she’s as dogged and determined, even though she admits to not really being a confrontational person. 

“I tend to try to negotiate solutions because I don’t believe in fighting for the sake of fighting, it’s a fight for making things right,” she says. 

At the same time, she’s no pushover. These days she is okay with getting angry or having to draw a line in the sand, or even having to call a time-out on playing nice with people who believe a lack of accountability and integrity don’t have consequences. 

“I used to think I had a good poker face, but now you’ll know when I’m angry,” she says. 

Strength at the office comes from leaning on colleagues who make the reciprocal effort to check in. There may be a moment to pause for a cup of coffee (she insists she makes a mean cuppa and has super spidey senses to sniff out the best cup of coffee anywhere). It’s to catch her breath, also to regroup and refocus for new battles that need to be waged.