The Constitution does not and should not prevent the democratically elected government from passing laws merely because an economically powerful minority opposes it.
It is inevitable that the constitutionality of aspects of the National Health Insurance Act will be challenged in court and that the Constitutional Court will have to consider these challenges. We do not yet know on exactly what grounds the constitutionality of the Act will be challenged, and it is thus currently not possible to say definitively whether any of the legal challenges will succeed. (more…)
Jacob Zuma needs potential MK voters to believe that if they vote for the party, they are voting for him […]
If recent opinion polls are to be believed, no political party will win an outright majority of National Assembly seats […]
It is worrying that there are increasingly desperate and shrill attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the IEC by making […]
Although judicial proceedings will generally be bound by the requirements of natural justice to a greater degree than will hearings before administrative tribunals, judicial decision-makers, by virtue of their positions, have nonetheless been granted considerable deference by appellate courts inquiring into the apprehension of bias. This is because judges ‘are assumed to be [people] of conscience and intellectual discipline, capable of judging a particular controversy fairly on the basis of its own circumstances’: The presumption of impartiality carries considerable weight, for as Blackstone opined at p. 361 in Commentaries on the Laws of England III . . . ‘[t]he law will not suppose possibility of bias in a judge, who is already sworn to administer impartial justice, and whose authority greatly depends upon that presumption and idea’. Thus, reviewing courts have been hesitant to make a finding of bias or to perceive a reasonable apprehension of bias on the part of a judge, in the absence of convincing evidence to that effect.