Quote of the week
Regard must be had to the higher standard of conduct expected from public officials, and the number of falsehoods that have been put forward by the Public Protector in the course of the litigation. This conduct included the numerous “misstatements”, like misrepresenting, under oath, her reliance on evidence of economic experts in drawing up the report, failing to provide a complete record, ordered and indexed, so that the contents thereof could be determined, failing to disclose material meetings and then obfuscating the reasons for them and the reasons why they had not been previously disclosed, and generally failing to provide the court with a frank and candid account of her conduct in preparing the report. The punitive aspect of the costs order therefore stands.
Public Protector v South African Reserve Bank (CCT107/18) [2019] ZACC 29 (22 July 2019)
African Court still not up and running
The African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights is far from being a reality, Transvaal Judge President Bernard Ngoepe said on Tuesday. According to iafrica website the Court will only be up and running towards the end of the year:
“The court only exists on paper,” said Ngoepe, who is one of the 11 judges from all over Africa sworn in July last year to serve on the court. “There are no premises, no staff, nothing. We had to start from scratch with the budget, which is time consuming,” he said at an Institute of Security Studies seminar in Pretoria.
The interesting question is what is going to happen once the Court starts hearing cases and begins to enforce the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. What happens if that court, for example, hears a case from Doctors for Life about South Africa’s abortion law or the same-sex marriage law?
