SA’s courts are in a sorry state, with many judicial officers struggling to secure the most basic of tools for their trade, such as access to literature and a working internet.
This is the gist of the feedback from officials of the office of the chief justice (OCJ) during a parliamentary portfolio committee meeting last week. MPs who quizzed them concluded that rehabilitating the courts must be among the top priorities for recently appointed chief justice Raymond Zondo.
Zondo was appointed to lead SA’s judiciary recently after having held the position in an acting capacity. President Cyril Ramaphosa has said he was considering appeals court head Mandisa Maya as Zondo’s second-in-command. She will be interviewed in June along with other candidates running for the position.
Zondo and his deputy will have their work cut out in helping court personnel, including judges, perform their duties. Several examples raised during the portfolio committee meeting, attended by justice minister Ronald Lamola and OCJ seniors, stem from the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), but sources told Business Day the issues raised affect many courts nationwide.
DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach said last week the SCA had “a number of infrastructure challenges”, and during an oversight visit, Maya raised the example of the dilapidated state of the court’s roof. “Nothing is done to fix that. What they do is they just fix the leak, patch the leaks,” said Breytenbach.
Steve Swart of the African Christian Democratic Party noted that several of the issues raised in the committee meeting were the public works department’s responsibility. He asked about progress in categorising the SCA as a national key point to shield it from load-shedding. “There are problems with basics such as telephones. Apparently, the OCJ has not been able to help in this regard,” Swart said, based on his visit to the SCA.
Breytenbach also raised concerns about the lack of wheelchair access to the SCA and that its air conditioning has been malfunctioning for a decade. “Does the office of the chief justice get involved in these issues and do they help to address them?”
While he retired as a Western Cape high court judge two years ago, Dennis Davis remains in touch with colleagues on the bench. Judges were reticent about speaking to the media and being cited, so Davis shared insights from his conversations with former colleagues. “The courts have an extraordinarily unreliable internet service. It doesn’t work properly. It’s up and down,” he said.
Two judges who shared input through an intermediary on condition of anonymity, and Davis, said judges struggled to access valuable online resources, including law reports. “Our libraries have degraded so that we don’t have up-to-date books or access to electronic publications,” said a judge who asked not to be named.
‘Extraordinary degradation’
Davis added: “There has been an extraordinary degradation of the conditions in which judges are operating.”
The Gauteng high court division, led by Dunstan Mlambo, has successfully introduced an online case management system called CaseLines.
However, as one judge pointed out, it is not used countrywide. “You will never be able to have it unless you’ve got a reliable computer and IT system,” the judge said.
During the parliamentary committee meeting last week, Lamola and the OCJ representatives heard that court personnel and judges themselves sometimes have no choice but to buy mobile data out of their own pockets when court infrastructure fails them.
Another basic but crucial issue is malfunctioning air conditioners, courthouses without windows, broken lifts and court recorders that have brought proceedings to a halt when they crashed.
Davis argued that solving these basic problems would not prove inordinately expensive. As for the cost to the public of neglecting to do so, he explained: “It means that you’ve got judges under pressure, not able to deliver justice to the extent that they should.” These challenges added to a compendium of challenges SA’s courts faced. “An [overhaul] of the entire system is required,” he said.
MPs recently conducted an oversight visit to the SCA and raised their concerns with the OCJ. They insisted such issues be priorities for Zondo.
The efficient and effective functioning of the courts was obviously critical to SA’s administration of justice, public access to justice and, more broadly, the rule of law. For a litigant or legal professional, having a dysfunctional legal system is highly undesirable, particularly when funds from taxes are allocated for the running of courts.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.