Mail & Guardian Reporter
THE white, male edifice of the South African judiciary sustained another blow this week with the announcement of three new women judges. The three, attorney Kathy Satchwell, Geraldine Borchers, SC, and Vivian Niles-Duner, will bring to seven the number of women on the Bench. They will join the small club which includes Constitutional Court judges Yvonne Mokgoro and Kate O’Regan, Judge Lucy Mailula and Judge HN Traverso.
There are 173 judges in South Africa. The new appointments by the Judicial Service Commission still have to be confirmed by President Nelson Mandela.
l The call by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to have apartheid judges testify at the truth commission could throw some fascinating decisions into the public spotlight.
For example, there is the judge, presently a member of the Transvaal Provincial Division, who made a name for himself by slapping a fine on a farmer who beat a labourer to death. The same judge also pronounced that a series of savage beatings by state-supported tribal authorities in Namibia in 1974, which left victims with life-threatening wounds, were proper. He declined to allow an interdict against further beatings — which involved stripping victims in public and flogging them with rods.
Chief Justice Rumpff, however, felt differently and upheld the appeal against this judgment with costs.
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