In January 2020, we did what any couple in love does: we tried to book a wedding venue. Six years and one Equality Court order later, we are writing this article because the institution that took our complaint out of our hands in the name of protecting our rights has, in our view, betrayed not just us but the entire LGBTQIA+ community.
On 23 April 2026, one day before Freedom Day weekend, no less, the Equality Court of the Western Cape made an order by agreement between the South African Human Rights Commission (“SAHRC”) and the owners of the Beloftebos Wedding Venue, who discriminated against us.
We are not parties to that agreement. We were not consulted on its terms. We were not asked whether it reflected the harm we suffered, whether the apology structure was adequate, or whether six years of delay was a price we were willing to pay for what the settlement actually delivers. The first time we saw the signed agreement was after it had already been made an order of the court, and then only after a great deal of effort was expended to obtain a copy.
This is the story of how that happened, and why it matters far beyond us.
How the SAHRC came to take our case, reluctantly
When Beloftebos refused to host our wedding in early 2020, on the basis of its owners’ religious belief that marriage is “a sacred covenant between a man and a woman”, we took our complaint to the SAHRC.
The Commission, a Chapter 9 institution created by section 184 of the Constitution and mandated to “promote respect for human rights”, “promote the protection, development and attainment of human rights”, and “monitor and assess the observance of human rights in the Republic”, did not, in fact, decide to run with it.
It took several complaints, newspaper articles, and the discovery that we were not the first couple Beloftebos had turned away (nor, as it turned out, the first complainants to bring the matter to the SAHRC’s attention) before the Commission stirred at all.
Even then, the SAHRC moved only after a fellow Chapter 9 institution, the Commission for Gender Equality, intervened, and only after we insisted on a meeting.
At that meeting, it became clear to us that the SAHRC had little real appetite for taking up this matter. We informed the Commission that we were withdrawing our complaint and would be approaching the Equality Court ourselves, as is our constitutional right.
It was that, and only that, which finally spurred the SAHRC, and its then-Commissioner André Gaum, into action: not the rights of LGBTQIA+ South Africans, but the urgency, as Commissioner Gaum himself put it to counsel, of the SAHRC being first to file.
As the rest of this article will show, it is precisely that “first to file” status that the Commission has, for six years, wielded as a weapon to deliver an outcome that has, in our view, betrayed us and our community.
In March 2020, the SAHRC launched its application in the Equality Court. The papers spoke the language of our Constitution: unfair discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the limits of religious freedom in commercial life, a precedent-setting test case.
We hoped the public language reflected a genuine institutional commitment. With hindsight, we believe the priority was always procedural, that the Commission be the named applicant and that it control the outcome and the relief sought, rather than substantive.
What actually happened over the next six years
For large stretches of those six years, almost nothing did. The matter moved at a glacial pace. It was at one point struck from the roll for non-service. Our own attorney and counsel, whom we instructed to apply to intervene as parties so we could be heard in proceedings nominally brought on our behalf, spent years pressing the SAHRC simply to advance the matter, to produce an indexed bundle, to set the case down.
We were not interlopers in someone else’s case. We were the original complainants, watching from outside as the institution that had insisted on being first to file did very little with that primacy.
Then, late in 2025, we were informed that the SAHRC and Beloftebos had entered mediation. We asked repeatedly to be kept informed of the terms under discussion. We were not.
The Commission that had once told a court it was acting in the interests of LGBTQIA+ South Africans was now negotiating, behind closed doors, with the very respondents whose conduct it had brought to court, and was doing so without consulting the complainants in whose name it had filed, or any of the other cited parties to the proceedings.
On 5 March 2026, the settlement was signed. On 15 April 2026, a judge made it an order of court. On 23 April 2026, the stamped order was issued.
Between 5 March and 15 April, a full six weeks, the SAHRC could have informed us, the other cited respondents, or the amicus curiae of the terms it had agreed. It could have placed our objections, or theirs, on the court record before the agreement became an order. It could have done what any institution genuinely committed to the rights it claims to defend would have done: bring the parties whose rights were at stake into the room. It did none of these things. The exclusion was not a function of urgency or oversight; it was a function of choice.
In the court’s heading, we remain, to this day, merely “Applicants for Admission as Intervening Parties”: never admitted, never heard, never dismissed. Our application to be joined was simply overtaken by a settlement we were not party to.
The Commission’s “first to file” status, secured six years earlier on the strength of our complaint, had become the very mechanism by which we were locked out of the resolution of our own case.
What the settlement actually says
This is the part we find hardest to write. Read the agreement yourself and you will see what we saw.
Mr and Mrs de Villiers apologise, but only to Alexandra Thorne and Alex Lu, the couple they turned away in 2017. There is no apology to us. We are, in fact, not named anywhere in the operative clauses of the agreement. The couple whose refusal of service sparked the 2020 application, the application the SAHRC said it was bringing for the benefit of all same-sex couples in South Africa, do not appear in the settlement at all.
The SAHRC, by contrast, does apologise: to the respondents. It apologises for not having attempted mediation at the outset. It acknowledges the “tremendous personal hurt and financial losses” suffered by the owners of the venue that was found, in the same agreement, to have engaged in prima facie unfair discrimination under the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act. It calls on the public to refrain from making derogatory comments about the respondents.
The substantive undertaking by Beloftebos is that, going forward, it will not offer the venue to the general public for any marriage requiring state sanction. In other words, rather than open its doors to same-sex couples, the venue will close its doors to everyone.
Whether this counts as a victory depends on what you thought the case was about. If it was about protecting the freedom of a venue to discriminate in practice by withdrawing from the market altogether, it is a win. If it was about affirming that LGBTQIA+ South Africans cannot be refused goods and services on the basis of their sexual orientation, it is a hollow outcome: no precedent, no finding on the merits, no acknowledgement of the complainants who made the case possible.
And the SAHRC agreed to bear its own costs. Six years of litigation, at public expense, for this.
Why this is bigger than us
We want to be careful here. This article is not, in the end, about our hurt feelings, though we have them, and we think they are legitimate. It is about what our experience says about the institution.
A Chapter 9 body does not exist for its own convenience. It exists because the drafters of our Constitution understood that rights on paper mean nothing without institutions prepared to vindicate them. The SAHRC’s mandate is not to mediate equality complaints into the ground; it is to protect, promote and monitor human rights in the Republic.
When it takes carriage of a matter from private complainants, particularly when, as in our case, it does so to ensure its own primacy in the proceedings, it assumes a public duty. Not just to those complainants, but to every person whose rights are implicated by the precedent the case could set.
That duty is not discharged by initial reluctance, followed by a six-year delay, followed by a closed-door mediation that excludes the complainants, the other cited respondents, and the amicus curiae.
It is certainly not discharged by an agreement that apologises to the respondents, calls for public silence about their conduct, and leaves the underlying legal question, whether “sincerely held religious belief” can justify the commercial refusal of service to same-sex couples, entirely unanswered for the next venue, the next florist, the next caterer.
The courts in this country have developed a rich jurisprudence on LGBTQIA+ equality precisely because previous complainants, supported by institutions that took their mandates seriously, pushed cases through to judgment. National Coalition. Fourie. Satchwell.
Those cases made South Africa the first country in Africa to recognise same-sex marriage. They did not do so by being settled quietly, on terms dictated by the party found to have discriminated, while the complainants watched from outside the room.
What accountability should look like
We are not calling for the SAHRC to be abolished. South Africa needs a strong Human Rights Commission; arguably, it needs a much stronger one than it currently has. What we are calling for is accountability, and the reforms that follow from it.
First, the Commission owes the LGBTQIA+ community an honest public account of how this case was conducted: why it initially declined to act on multiple complaints, why it filed only when faced with the prospect of complainants going to the Equality Court without it, why it then took six years, who took the decision to mediate, why the complainants and the cited respondents were not consulted on the terms, and what precedent the Commission believes it has set.
Second, the SAHRC should adopt a binding protocol, of the kind that exists in the ombud offices of several comparable jurisdictions, requiring that complainants in whose name a matter is prosecuted must be consulted before settlement, and must have their objections recorded on the court file if settlement proceeds over their objections. That we have had to argue for this in 2026 is itself a damning comment.
Third, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development, which oversees the Commission under section 181(5) of the Constitution, should ask the SAHRC to account for this matter directly. Not because this case is unique, but because we suspect it is not.
A final word
This past weekend, South Africans celebrated thirty-two years of constitutional democracy. The Constitution we commemorate is the same Constitution that, in section 9, prohibits unfair discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and in section 184 creates the very Commission that has, in our case, failed to defend it.
We are going to spend the coming days reading the settlement carefully with our legal team, considering our options, and deciding how best to continue the fight that the SAHRC, in our view, has walked away from.
We will have more to say. But we wanted to say this first, and to say it now, because six years of silence on our part was six years too many.
Sasha-Lee Watling and Megan Watling are the complainants in SA Human Rights Commission v Beloftebos Wedding Venue and Others (Case No. EC 04/2020), Equality Court, Western Cape Division. They write in their personal capacities.
MambaOnline has requested a response from the SAHRC and will publish it if it is provided.
