bark
The silence surrounding last week’s appointments by the Judicial Services Commission is deafening. The Bench and academia are seething with indignation over the appointments of the two judges president and one deputy.
Yet there is not a bleat of public protest other than the resignation of Judge Piet van der Walt from the Office of the Deputy Judge President of Pretoria – an ambiguous protest at best. (Is he complaining at the extra burden of work he faces, by having an inexperienced judge president foisted upon him, or is he making a stand on principle?)
Fresh disclosures as to what happened in the selection process are reported elsewhere in this edition and make the absence of protest by the legal fraternity even more of a matter for concern.
The central issue is not the abuse of senior members of the judiciary on account of their skin colour – although that is in itself sufficient justification for protest – but the emergence of what appears to be an African National Congress caucus in the Judicial Services Commission which threatens the politicisation of the judiciary and, to our mind, undermines the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
The existence of such a caucus is seemingly assumed by most legal commentators. The poisoning of the selection process by the cynicism of politicking would appear to be confirmed by the extraordinary racial line- up in the vote for the judge presidency of the Cape – in which the whites voted overwhelmingly for the black candidate, and the blacks for the white candidate.
The explanation for this inverse polarisation seems to be that the black candidate was being given a professional vote of confidence by his peers – who are, of course, predominantly white – while the politicians, who are predominantly ANC- aligned, were voting on the basis of other concerns which may or may not have something to do with the future candidacy of a former law partner to the minister of justice.
The outcome is one of stunning perversity; that the black candidate best equipped for senior office is spurned by the Judicial Services Commission, while two other candidates who are self-evidently ill- qualified gain preferment. And the nation, to the extent it reacts at all, applauds this travesty as overdue reform of the judiciary!
But why the lack of protest from such as our law schools and the professional organisations which pose as watchdogs of the legal system? The suspicion must be that they have been silenced by fear of being placed in a position where they can be attacked as opponents of black empowerment.
We are perhaps fortunate that we do not feel constrained by such a need for political correctness. Our stand in the past – particularly our outspoken criticism of the judiciary for failing to take on board denunciation of its past role as a handmaiden of apartheid – is unchallengeable. We believe it gives us the authority to be able to point out that in this deafening silence we may be witnessing the emergence of a racial variation on McCarthyism.
Cry in the dark
For the 13th time Pope John Paul II has produced a magnum opus of thought. For a man in his late 70s, in failing health and with a punishing schedule of travel, it is an astonishing achievement with which to mark the 20th anniversary of his papacy.
Like him or not, one has soberly to acknowledge his remarkable leadership. No area or aspect of the billion-strong Roman Catholic Church has been left untouched by a papacy that has been characterised by the relentless drive of a man who has struggled with both the totalitarian political ideologies of the 20th century – Nazism and communism – and seen them collapse.
But singularly less successful has been his ongoing struggle with the seemingly inexorable tide of secular, materialistic individualism. Time and again, this old man has railed against the selfishness, the self- indulgence and the delusions such thinking spawns.What makes this dawning realisation particularly bitter for the pope is that as the ideology of communism rolled back in Eastern Europe, the faithful did not celebrate their new-found freedom in church and are increasingly turning their backs on what had sustained their identity.
Fides et Ratio, more than any previous encyclical, defines Pope John Paul II’s papacy; it is an impassioned call for humanity to remember unfashionable concepts of idealism, beauty, truth and goodness. He is scathing about modern Western philosophy that has trivialised itself by its “modesty”, refusing to ask the central questions of human existence and fiddling only with details. Without meaning, we are left with a nihilistic culture of despair. It is an optimistic, generous document.
But the record of the church over the past two decades is strikingly at odds with the message of Fides et Ratio. The radical, exploratory intellectual freedom that he celebrates in this document is strikingly at odds with a papacy that has succeeded in stifling the very debate by theologians that the pope appears to be urging. This is an extraordinary contradiction in one of the 20th century’s most remarkable men.
This is a man for whom discipline ensured the survival of a church under persecution and repression. But the challenge the church faces from individualism and consumer capitalism is of a different order, and this powerful old man finds himself outstripped, and is both bewildered and horrified.