South Africa has a complicated relationship with human rights. Before apartheid, the British and Dutch exploited the land and resources, as well as the people in the region. Once the apartheid regime took hold in the 1940s, human rights violations only increased. Black South Africans were treated as lesser beings than their white counterparts and violently suppressed, even though they accounted for the majority of the population. When apartheid ended in 1994, the new government sought to turn South Africa around socially. Unfortunately, only ten years later there was not much change except that the new targets of South Africans' aggression were immigrants from surrounding African countries. This outbreak of xenophobic violence in recent years is a grave violation of human rights violations.

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On this page are links to different human rights documents and agencies that the South African government is dedicated to in paper, but the upsurge in xenophobia has gone in direct violation of them.