Home Repossession

Granting mortgage loans to customers with a high potential of insolvency became a widespread practice in Spain during the recent housing bubble. A practice, nevertheless, that made sense in the social settings where bank clerks, real estate agents or mortgage brokers found themselves at that time.

On 24 August 2012, 46 applicants who collectively refer to themselves as the “Forgotten Poor Black Citizens of South Africa” approached the Constitutional Court to make an application for direct access to the Court. The applicants sought an order from the Court setting aside a number of court orders from lower courts. The applicants declined the suggestion to obtain legal representation and, in order to further its understanding of the matter, the Court requested SERI and the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) to conduct an initial investigation into the application and to compile a report of the findings. SERI and the LRC found that at the core, the majority of the matters the applicants seek to bring under appeal point very strongly to potentially far-reaching systemic failures in the process of evictions and executions concerning residential property.