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The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (hereafter POPIA) has the potential to disrupt health research in South Africa. While the legal status quo is that broad consent by research participants is acceptable, POPIA requires specific consent for any processing of research participants' health and genetic information. However, POPIA offers mechanisms such as an exemption from specified measures which can potentially be used to ameliorate its impact. It is proposed that the health research sector should seek to utilise these mechanisms – in particular, a sector-wide exemption of all health research projects from the requirement of specific consent by research participants, subject to the conditions that: (a) a health research project must be approved by a health research ethics committee, and that (b) either specific, broad or tiered consent must be obtained for a health research project. Importantly, it would be counter-productive to approach such an application for exemption from the perspective of inconvenience for health researchers. Instead, an application for exemption must be approached from a human rights platform, and must be supported by solid evidence. Such evidence should include the results of empirical studies of South African research participants' preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general policy in South African insolvency law is that assets must be recovered and included in the insolvent estate, and that this action must be to the advantage of the creditors of the insolvent estate. But there are several exceptions to this rule and an asset that is the subject of such an exception may be excluded from the insolvent estate. The Insolvency Act, however, does not expressly distinguish between excluded and exempt assets, thereby resulting in problem areas in the field of exemption law in insolvency in South Africa. It may be argued that the fundamental difference between excluded and exempt assets is that excluded assets should never form part of an insolvent estate and should be beyond the reach of the creditors of the insolvent estate, while exempt assets initially form part of the insolvent estate, but in certain circumstances may be exempted from the estate for the benefit of the insolvent debtor, thereby allowing the debtor to use such excluded or exempt assets to start afresh before or after rehabilitation. Modern society, sociopolitical developments and human rights requirements have necessitated a broadening of the classes of assets that should be excluded or exempted from insolvent estates. This article considers assets excluded from the insolvent estates of individual debtors by legislation other than the Insolvency Act. It must, however, be understood that these legislative provisions relate to insolvent estates and thus generally overlap in one way or another with some provisions of the Insolvency Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]