CJ SLAMS GOVT OVER SHORTAGE OF JUDGES

 MBABANE – “Recognise us as an important arm of government.” This was directed to government by Chief Justice Bheki Maphalala yesterday when the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear government’s appeal of the judgment declaring certain sections of the Sedition and Subversive Activities Act of 1938 and Suppression of Terrorism Act of 2008 unconstitutional.

The matter could not proceed because there are not enough Supreme Court judges to constitute the bench. There are seven judges in the Supreme Court and a majority of them have dealt with the matter one way or the other.

Parties

This resulted in the case being postponed until sufficient judges were available to hear the matter and the representatives of the parties would be advised accordingly.  Maphalala said the matter was important in that there were people who were arrested and given stringent bail conditions.

He said he would have loved to proceed with the matter to finality but the JSC had, since 2015, been knocking at the doors of government to create and give posts to the Judiciary but those posts had not been created. The chief justice decried that the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) cannot not create and advertise posts in the Judiciary.

“We have a situation where, unlike in other jurisdictions, commissions have the power to create posts and proceed to advertise those posts, but we have to go to the Ministry of Public Service and beg for posts. 

“As the Judiciary, we consider ourselves to be one of the three arms of government and as such we should be in a position to enjoy that autonomy of being one of the branches of government,” said the chief justice.

He said it was unfortunate that the JSC still has to go to the executive to beg for posts. The CJ mentioned that the previous government never gave them posts and they had renewed their request with the present government.

The CJ also highlighted that the terrorism case was one of many which were pending because the bench could not be constituted for one or more reasons. He noted that this defeated the purpose of a fast and speedy resolution of cases.

This situation, according to Maphalala resulted in the appointment of acting judges. The CJ said this was not done out of an admiration for acting judges but because the backlog of cases was increasing. Maphalala said the Judiciary was not getting the support it should be getting in terms of being given judicial posts.

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