Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
DGRU judicial appointments database
The DGRU’s focus on judicial governance has led to it making available to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) research reports on candidates for judicial appointment, and to DGRU researchers attending, monitoring and commenting on the interviews of candidates for judicial appointment. Such reports have been complied for the September 2009, October 2010, April 2011, October 2011, April 2012, June 2012 and October 2012 interviews, as well as the Chief Justice’s interview in September 2011.
The intention of these reports continues to be to assist the JSC by providing an objective insight into the judicial records of the short-listed candidates. The reports are also intended to provide civil society and other interested stakeholders with a basis on which to assess candidates’ suitability for appointment to the bench.
The DGRU has recently created a database that contains all our reports
This database presents the DGRU’s reports on candidates for judicial appointments, which have been compiled for the Judicial Service Commission’s interviews since September 2009. The reports summarise candidate’s reported and unreported judgments.
The reports present the dates on which cases were heard, the dates on which judgments were delivered, and note subsequent upholding or overturning by appeal courts, where such information was available at the time the reports were complied.
The database allows the reports to be searched according to a candidate’s name, the provincial division to which they were applying to be appointed or in which they had delivered judgments, the name of a case, and the year in which the case was decided. It is possible to search under multiple categories simultaneously.
We hope that this database will make the results of our research easily accessible to anybody who may wish to research the track record of candidates for judicial appointments. The reports contain a sample of candidate’s judgments and are not intended to cover all the judgments a candidate has written.
The database can be found at http://www.dgrujudgements.co.za/
