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About Open By-laws

Open By-laws is a part of LawLibrary.org.za. It makes our by-laws easier to find, read and share.

Municipal by-laws form part of the legal foundation for effective service delivery and cooperative communities. In many municipalities, however, the by-laws are out of date or difficult to find. Open By-laws helps to solve this problem by making up-to-date by-laws freely available to everyone.

Open By-laws is a project by Laws.Africa and AfricanLII.

What are by-laws?

By-laws are laws managed by municipalities. The Constitution of South Africa gives municipalities the power to pass their own legislation, in the form of by-laws, for particular subject areas. These by-laws hold the same power and force as other national and provincial legislation.

Municipalities are required by the Municipal Systems Act to make their by-laws publicly available on their website. However, most municipalities lack the capacity to do so. Open By-laws helps to fill this gap.

Contributors

An enormous thanks to our contributors when we started, and before we became a part of Laws.Africa:

Ally Adendorf, Andrew Collier, Christopher Gevers, Cliff Featherstone, Greg Kempe, Juan Barrios, Matt Adendorf, Nqobile Sibisi, Pivendren Naik, Richard Gevers, Tricia Govindasamy.

In 2013, Open By-laws received a Shuttleworth Flash Grant and an AMI Sandbox Fund grant, and we're grateful to these funders who helped us in our infancy.

Disclaimer

We aren't lawyers. We don't write these laws, we're just making them available and there may be mistakes. Always get a professional legal opinion.

Credits