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Witwatersrand local division, High Court of South Africa

In a ground-breaking judgment - the first in which the constitutional right to water has explicitly been raised - Judge MP Toska criticised the municipality for its discriminatory approach to the provision of water. The Judge found that: "the underlying basis for the introduction of prepayment meters seems to me to be credit control. If this is true, I am unable to understand why this credit control measure is only suitable in the historically poor black areas and not the historically rich white areas. Bad payers cannot be described in terms of colour or geographical area."