South Africa:Development plans in many of the South African cities hosting the 2010 world cup games were thrown into turmoil this week when a court ruled that Johannesburg's inner city squatters could not be evicted unless alternative accommodation was provided.
More than 100,000 of the country's poorest city dwellers have been facing the constant threat of eviction in recent years because host cities have been using the tournament as a vehicle to speed up the advancement of their redevelopment plans since South Africa won the right to host the FIFA tournament.
City officials considered it essential that rejuvenation takes place in the 10 host cities ahead of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of tourists, as many of the urban areas have become severely run down and hotbeds of crime since the end of the apartheid era in 1994.
However, last Tuesday's landmark ruling by the constitutional court, the highest court in the land, has thrown these plans into disarray because it is unclear how the inner city homeless can be rehoused in a country where millions of people are already on housing lists and live in squatter camps.
Before the legal proceedings began, Johannesburg had evicted thousands of the country's poorest people from 125 buildings as it began to implement its inner city redevelopment plan, which involves the construction and refurbishment of hotels and apartment blocks ahead of 2010.
Many of Johannesburg's estimated 26,000 inner city squatters arrived from rural areas in search of employment after the 1994 democratic elections. Before that these had been "whites only" areas.
When officials tried to evict 300 tenants of the San Jose building in Berea suburb in 2005 on the grounds the building was unsafe and unhealthy, the issue entered the courts and each verdict was subsequently appealed to a higher court.
"Potential homelessness must be considered by a city when it decides whether to evict people from buildings," the constitutional court said in a statement after the ruling. Human rights advocates believe the ruling has set a precedent in relation to any further attempts to evict squatters from derelicts inner city buildings.
Reacting to the judgment, tenants' spokeswoman Cherice Sibanda told SABC news, the state broadcaster, that she was overjoyed.
"I'm so glad. I don't know what to do. I'm very much happy. I think it sends a message to our government that really - what they were doing - it was totally unfair to the poor people," she said.