Nine Ekurhuleni women killed in two months, rights commission opens inquiry on 28 September

Nine women were murdered in Ekurhuleni in two months, and on 28 September three of the country’s Chapter 9 institutions will open a joint national inquiry into the machinery that is supposed to protect them.

The South African Human Rights Commission will run the inquiry alongside the Commission for Gender Equality and the CRL Rights Commission. It sits from 28 September to 2 October and will work through the whole chain of state response, from the moment a case is reported to the moment an offender is released.

That chain is the subject. Reporting, victim support, police investigation, prosecution, sentencing and rehabilitation will each be examined in turn.

What the commission says about the killings

The commission has said it views the killings with horror and that the country remains unsafe for women. In its own words, violence against women strips them of the rights to life, safety, dignity and freedom that the Constitution guarantees.

It has also pushed back on how offenders are usually imagined. Quoting Justice Khampepe’s ruling in S v Tshabalala, the commission reminded the public that rape is not committed by strangers who look like monsters. Those who rape are, in that ruling’s words, fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, lovers, mentors, bosses and colleagues.

That is why the inquiry is framed around homes, workplaces and communities rather than around a hunt for an outsider.

The numbers behind the decision

Police statistics for the first quarter of the 2026/27 year record 569 women murdered between April and June 2026. In the same three months, 1 052 women survived an attempt on their lives. A further 8 814 rape cases were opened in the first quarter of the year.

Those figures sit against a decade of presidential declarations that treat gender-based violence as a national crisis. The commission’s position is that the declarations have not been matched by the work that would make them real.

The commission’s 2026 report on school safety also found abuse in schools, carried out by teachers, by fellow learners and by outside service providers.

Municipalities are in the frame too

The inquiry will not look only at the police and the courts. Commissioners have said that broken streetlights, unkempt open fields and abandoned buildings create the conditions for violence, and that municipalities carry a duty to fix them.

The commission’s own service delivery reports have made the point before. Open fields must be maintained, long grass cut, abandoned buildings rehabilitated, streetlights kept working, and water and sanitation available in safe spaces.

For residents of Ekurhuleni townships, that is not an abstract argument. A dark street and an overgrown field are the two things a woman walking home at night has to plan around.

The public is being asked to bring evidence

The commission has called on civil society organisations and individual citizens to submit evidence to the inquiry. That invitation is the practical part of the process. A court judgment, a police case number, a municipal maintenance log or a first-hand account of how a case was handled all become part of the record the commissioners will work from.

The inquiry’s terms cover the full pipeline, which means the questions will not stop at arrest. They will follow a case through the National Prosecuting Authority, through sentencing, and into the correctional system, where the commission will ask what rehabilitation actually happens before an offender returns to society.

What happens on 28 September

The joint national inquiry opens on 28 September and runs to 2 October. It is a Chapter 9 process, which means the three institutions act under the Constitution and not under the direction of any department.

Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has said the provincial government will respond to the Ekurhuleni murders. The inquiry will test whether that response reaches the parts of the system where cases have been failing.

Source: The Citizen, Ekurhuleni murders: State’s bloody neglect forces human rights watchdogs to step in