Today was the second day of the court hearings for our Interdict seeking to halt the ongoing construction at the River Club. It was filled with presentation by Counsel for the developers, LLPT, and by counsel for the Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning who awarded the Environmental Authorisation, over-riding the rejection by HWC of the Heritage Impact Assessment. Judge Goliath asked only a few critical questions of the advocates. One of her comments pushed the counsel for the Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning to accept that LLPT had initiated construction at their own risk. This is important when consideration is made of the ‘balance of convenience’, one of the key elements important to the granting of an urgent interdict.

But we also heard counsel for these two respondents argue that there was no evidence of irreparable harm which would justify the urgency of the interdict. That all depends on how harm is defined and, since the developers and their supporters in government think that irrevocably destroying the intangible heritage of the riverine valley can be compensated for by a cultural centre, herb garden, amphitheatre and Khoi iconography, they don’t seem to get the picture. As Heritage Western Cape said in their final comments, no amount of creating meaning will compensate for the loss of the most important heritage resource on the site: Its open, green qualities as a remnant of a landscape of immense intangible historic and cultural heritage significance. Put another way, “the site is of sufficient significance within itself and does not need to be imbued with meaning.”

But, interestingly, at one point, the LLPT’s advocate described Amazon as a partner in the development. Up to now, they have been at pains to describe Amazon Web Services as merely a tenant. So, as Tauriq Jenkins describes in his open letter to Jeff Bezos yesterday, “word is now out, in the last innings of the game, and the word is Amazon.” It’s Amazon’s promised tenancy that makes this entire project possible, according to the LLPT’s counsel. By that token, Amazon has it entirely within its powers to say they will relocate off the sacred floodplain and take up any one of the other 5 shortlisted sites which were available to them before the River Club mysteriously appeared at the top of a new shortlist.

Protesters at the start of this morning’s session at the High Court made it clear that it’s time Amazon took responsibility for the threatened destruction of a sacred heritage site of substantial environmental sensitivity.

The court hearings are livestreamed on Facebook at this link.  Unfortunately, it seems that it will not possible to establish a You Tube channel link because of bandwidth issues within the High Court building.

We are still pushing hard to persuade the judge that our grounds for the interdict are strong.

And, as always, please help us fund these legal costs by contributing at our fundraising site. 

Visit our website and follow the Liesbeek Action Campaign on twitter: @LiesbeekAction.

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