While we focus here on the nine deaths that Judge Mmonoa Teffo found to be unnatural, there were 144 deaths associated with the Life Esidimeni tragedy. Ultimately, these were human beings and for the world to know what happened to them is better than the world not knowing.
The Life Esidimeni Inquest stands as a crucial accountability process for a national tragedy that ought never to have happened and should never happen again, writes Julia Chaskalson and Mbali Baduza as they summarise and assess progress at the inquest since October – having previously written about the first months of the inquest from July to October last year.
Although individual families of the mental healthcare users who died after they were discharged from Life Esidimeni in 2016 have been compensated for the violation of their constitutional rights, the actors responsible for the deaths, suffering, and torture of the mental healthcare patients have yet to be held criminally accountable. But that could change after a formal Judicial Inquest into the deaths, starting at the Pretoria High Court on 19 July 2021.
