Chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was informed about Western Cape judge president John Hlophe’s alleged assault of a fellow judge and his verbal attack on his deputy, Patricia Goliath, months before she formally accused him of gross misconduct and ignited a judicial crisis that now threatens to engulf the province’s high court.
The is according to a statement Goliath submitted to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) on Friday, now placing the chief justice at the centre of the often cringeworthy accusations and counteraccusations that define the relationship between the Western Cape’s most powerful judges.
Mogoeng’s office has previously welcomed the JSC’s assurance that it would deal with the complaints “without fear, favour or prejudice and as expeditiously as reasonably practicable”, but the chief justice has never publicly stated that he had been made aware of the events that led to those complaints months before they imploded.
Office of the Chief Justice spokesperson Nathi Mncube said in a statement on Sunday night that Mogoeng has been aware of the allegations against Hlophe since late 2019.
“But those allegations can only be resolved through the application of the law. It is necessary to emphasise that he does not have the power to resolve these challenges and cannot therefore exercise power he does not have,” Mncube said.
Mogoeng told Goliath that any allegation of misconduct against any judge must be reported to the JSC and any allegation of a crime must be reported to the police.
Nuclear agreement
“He also informed … Goliath that failure by any judge to report these allegations to the structures with the legal authority to address them, would be a betrayal of what judgeship or the judiciary is all about” Mncube said.
Earlier in 2020, Goliath lodged a 14-page complaint against Hlophe, accusing him of trying to get judges favourably disposed towards then president Jacob Zuma to decide on the legality of the crucial Russia-SA inter-governmental nuclear agreement.
She also claimed that he assaulted an unnamed junior judge, now identified as judge Mushtak Parker, who was then influenced by two other judges not to lay criminal charges against Hlophe.
After Parker’s claims that he may have “misremembered” the incident, 10 of the high court’s judges recently refused to share a bench with him, citing his “apparent lack of integrity”.
Hlophe in turn said Goliath’s accusations against him were a “malicious and bad faith attempt to generate public outrage, lynching and condemnation of my leadership of the division that would support calls for my immediate suspension and removal”.
Goliath has strongly denied that accusation.
She has also revealed how Hlophe “exploded into a fit of rage and aggressively shouted at me” after she assisted his wife, judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe, when she was injured at the couple’s home. Hlophe has denied assaulting his wife.
Goliath says Hlophe did not deny that her involvement in this domestic matter was the reason he gave for not wanting to work with her when they met in his office on October 2 2019.
It was during this meeting, Goliath says, that Hlophe also “confronted me with wild unfounded allegations made by his wife that he attributed to me”, including that “I told his wife to divorce him, remove ‘Hlophe’ from her surname and go to the press”.
Things then went from bad to worse.
In a series of events that remain highly disputed, Goliath says Parker told her and judge Derek Wille just days later that Hlophe had barged into his chambers “in a state of rage”, shouting expletives and asking twice if he wanted to have sex with his wife.
According to Goliath, Parker said Hlophe had violently pushed against his upper body in an attack that caused him to fall to the ground and injure his back. According to what Parker told Goliath at the time, the altercation happened after he had “gently tugged” at the belt of Salie-Hlophe’s criminal robe as a form of greeting.
It was these two incidents, Goliath says, that she told Mogoeng about. As a result of Hlophe now seeking to cast doubt on the truthfulness of this account, Mogoeng may be called to testify, putting him in the middle of one of the ugliest crises in SA democratic judicial history.
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