Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
The core problem with the majority judgment in EFF II is that the majority’s public reasons for its judgment are insufficient to explain the case’s outcome. It handed down a judgment that intruded on the ambit of the legislature’s authority and intervened in the highly political impeachment process; without having carefully set out legally legitimate reasons for doing so. The majority’s expressed reasons failed to substantiate the outcome at which it arrived, leaving a ‘reasoning vacuum’ waiting to be filled by competing hypotheses. One potential hypothesis gives the Court the benefit of the doubt: the majority, though handing down a ‘troubling’ decision ‘not justifiable from a ‘traditional’ separation of powers perspective’, was ultimately acting to reinforce the democratic process, in acknowledgement that Parliament had egregiously failed in its duty, as representative of the people, to hold political elites to account.
