The season is now — Time to enact family-law reform

“To everything… there is a season,” runs the familiar refrain of The Byrds’ song Turn! Turn! Turn!In South African family-law reform, we have had a very long season of waiting.A time to investigate. A time to consult. A time to draft. Then another election, another administration and another legislative programme. For Parliament, a time to begin again. For families still waiting for protection, another time to weep. Again. The South African Law Reform Commission’s recently published report on a Single Marriage Statute (3 November 2026) offers an opportunity to change that refrain. Its proposed Protected Relationships Bill reaches beyond conventional marriage to recognise religious marriages and life partnerships in which the parties have undertaken reciprocal duties of support. This is no marginal concern: Census 2022 recorded more than 3.7 million people living together as partners, while Stats SA records a sustained decline in marriage registrations. It is time to protect families as they live, not only as the law has historically preferred them.The question is no longer whether we know enough to begin. It is whether the executive and Parliament will see reform through.Parliamentary seasons, human lifetimesThe history is sobering.The Law Reform Commission submitted its report on Islamic Marriages and Related Matters, including a proposed draft bill, to the minister for Justice and Constitutional Development in July 2003. The Department of Justice subsequently published a draft Muslim Marriages Bill for public comment in January 2011. The Department of Home Affairs had already published a draft Domestic Partnerships Bill for comment in January 2008. These were concrete legislative proposals, not merely academic suggestions that someone might one day consider doing something.Yet the comprehensive protection those proposals envisaged did not become law. Some stalled before reaching Parliament; others encountered the end of a parliamentary term. The Civil Union Amendment Bill, which removed the opt-out allowing Home Affairs marriage officers to refuse to solemnise same-sex civil unions, lapsed in 2019, was revived and became law in 2020. Parliamentary transitions can interrupt reform. They need not defeat it.Home Affairs did eventually stir in the early 2020s. With the commission’s investigation already under way, the department embarked on a parallel process, introducing its Marriage Bill in December 2023. The destination was ostensibly the same: a unified legal framework. The department’s route, however, left unmarried life partnerships outside its protection and retained distinctions based on sex and sexual orientation in its provisions. The commission’s proposed Protected Relationships Bill offers a broader horizon of recognition. Even the department’s more limited measure remains unfinished business: it lapsed at the end of the Sixth Parliament, was revived in July 2024 and remains before the National Assembly.Meanwhile, families build lives that cannot wait on Parliament’s calendar. There is a time to love. Equal protection should not have to wait for another season.The students who askedOn 23 July 2017, my third-year Life Partnerships class at Rhodes University wrote to the newly appointed Minister of Home Affairs, Professor Hlengiwe Mkhize. They welcomed her appointment and, noting her academic background, hoped she would take their concerns seriously. Their letter described the vulnerability of people whose relationships lacked adequate statutory protection, particularly women in religious marriages and domestic partnerships. The students offered to send a representative to Pretoria. They invited the minister to Rhodes. They thanked her for reading their letter and said they looked forward to her response. There was none.Those students were not asking what to expect in their examination. They were asking why the law left people vulnerable when the problem was already known and proposals for addressing it already existed.Nine years later, their central question still demands an answer.Courts cannot do Parliament’s work indefinitelyIt would be wrong to suggest that family law has stood still. Courts have extended protections, and Parliament has enacted important changes. But too much progress has depended on someone first bearing the personal and financial burden of litigation.The Constitutional Court’s decision in the case of Bwanya addressed statutory inheritance and maintenance protection for surviving permanent life partners who had undertaken reciprocal duties of support. The subsequent legislative amendments were important. They were not, however, a comprehensive framework for the rights and obligations of life partners during their relationships and when those relationships end.The Divorce Amendment Act 1 of 2024 likewise introduced significant protections for Muslim marriages, including measures concerning dependent and minor children, redistribution of assets and forfeiture of patrimonial benefits. These changes followed the constitutional litigation over the failure to recognise and regulate Muslim marriages adequately.Such reforms matter. The concern is that legislative action has too often been reactive: a response to a court’s finding of constitutional failure rather than a sustained programme to prevent that failure.Public-interest organisations such as the Women’s Legal Centre Trust have done indispensable work in bringing these exclusions before the courts. Indeed, the Rhodes students’ letter referred to the trust’s litigation as evidence that legislative intervention was overdue.But access to protection should not depend on finding an organisation able to take a case, financing litigation privately or enduring years of uncertainty.Courts must remain available to vindicate rights. They should not have to serve as the country’s standing substitute for a comprehensive family-law reform programme.One framework, not one kind of familyThis is why the Single Marriage Statute report matters.Despite its title, its proposed answer is not simply a consolidated marriage law. The Protected Relationships Bill would encompass existing civil marriages, civil unions and customary marriages; marriages concluded according to religion, belief, culture or conviction; and qualifying life partnerships.For unregistered relationships, it proposes attention to the substance of a shared life: mutual commitment, financial dependence or interdependence, responsibility for children, shared household expenses and the performance of household duties, among other factors. Registration would not itself be a requirement for the validity of a relationship that otherwise qualifies for protection.These provisions recognise something that an exclusively ceremony-centred approach can miss. Relationships develop through conduct as well as declarations. People support one another, care for children and organise their lives around commitments that may never be recorded in a marriage register.The report’s ambition is to establish a common framework of protection without requiring everyone to abandon the religious, cultural or personal meaning of their relationships. Grounded in equality, dignity and freedom of religion, belief and opinion, it seeks to accommodate diversity without making protection depend on the form a family takes.One framework need not mean one ceremony, one faith or one way of living. Nor should respect for diversity mean accepting that some people must live with less protection.Complexity cannot become another holding patternThere are difficult questions here, and the report does not conceal them.When should legal obligations arise between unmarried partners? How should those obligations be proved? How should the law respect a genuine decision not to marry while recognising that the absence of marriage may reflect unequal bargaining power rather than a freely negotiated choice?The report records sharply differing views on these issues, including whether parties should be able to exclude the proposed framework’s application. Its draft bill takes the position that they should not. That is a substantial policy choice deserving careful parliamentary scrutiny.Supporting reform does not require treating every recommendation as beyond debate. It requires a willingness to debate the recommendations with a view to legislating, rather than allowing disagreement to become a permanent reason not to proceed.Recognition must also connect to meaningful consequences. The report identifies the relationship between its proposals and the commission’s separate work on matrimonial property and maintenance. These are connected parts of a reform programme, not reasons for each part to wait indefinitely for the others.The executive must coordinate that work. Parliament must scrutinise it, improve it where necessary and bring it to a conclusion.A credible programme would identify the responsible departments, explain how the proposals fit together and set public milestones for legislation and implementation. It would also plan for continuity across parliamentary terms rather than treating another election as an invitation to lose momentum.The work already undertaken deserves more than another place in the archive. So do the people whose experiences informed it.There has been a season for identifying the gaps, a season for proposing solutions and a season for asking excluded families to wait while the political calendar turns.The season for enactment is now. DMHelen Kruuse chaired the advisory committee for the South African Law Reform Commission’s recently published report, Review of Aspects of Matrimonial Property (9 November 2026). This article focuses on the preceding Single Marriage Statute report. She writes in her personal capacity, in support of the commission’s work, and not on its behalf.