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Help my Niece is losing her house
I write this plea here because I don’t know what else I can do I am hundreds of kilometres from and have no legal experience at all . I write with the hope that someone somewhere can help with information that can help my niece keep her house; the only thing she has after her husband’s death.
The Husband passed away in 2013 in a road accident. At this point my niece was estranged from him due to ill-treatment and unfaithfulness by him. As she was unemployed and could not maintain herself, she applied for financial support through the court of law. On Three occasions the deceased did not appear for the court case. Sadly he passed away in a manner described.
As the house was involved, the court advised my niece to ask a lawyer to handle the matters relating to her deceased husband’s estate. She did.
The lawyer has not been of much help; she does not update my niece at all unless my niece calls for information. The lawyer’s office is about 100 km away, which makes it financially impossible for my niece to travel to the place.
In spite of reassurances (verbal and written) from the lawyer, that everything was on track we learned (through calling provident fund company) that the ‘’board of trustees’’ awarded 0% to my niece and almost everything to the deceased son (whom he had before the marriage with my niece)
Their reasons for not awarding my niece the money are:
1. She was not living with the deceased at the time of death
2. She had no proof that she was financially depended on her husband for the time she was not living with him. This in spite of the fact that my niece mentioned the court case where she demanded support
3. She did not attend the funeral. The reason why she did not attend she was threatened by the family of the deceased, they also lied about the date of the funeral
Our legal system is complicated especially to less educated people such as my niece. I have tried women’s right legal charity based in Cape Town, because I believed that this is a women’s right issue based on patriarchal attitudes in our country, to no avail.
Our questions are;1) is there anything we can do to challenge this situation? 2) Has the lawyer breached client-lawyer trust, if so what can we do?3) Does this mean she could lose her house too?
Thanks
