WEDNESDAY, 5.30PM
THE General Council of the Bar submitted a 211-page document to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Wednesday, prior to the TRC’s special hearings on the apartheid era judiciary, which begin on Saturday.
The document outlines the failings of the SA judiciary and details the moral dilemma of judges who had to find justice within the limits of an unjust legal system which, it says, encourages judges to have a ”greater concern for the technicalities of law than for issues of human rights”.
The document says the innate conservatism and support for the National Party’s politics among the judiciary ensured the judgments made from the 1960s to the late 1980s did not challenge the status quo.
The Bar Council said the Appellate Division in particular comprised judges who had been appointed because of their support for the NP, which in turn meant the NP’s political opponents were more likely to be convicted. It said these judges also willingly upheld the imposition of states of emergency. The Bar said it does not believe judges were ”powerless in the face of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty”. It added: ”Too few judges were sensitive, and by this we mean publicly and openly sensitive, to the injustices and abuses of human rights which apartheid generated.”