support staff
Marianne Merten
Chief magistrates across South Africa are threatening to stop doing their paperwork unless the Department of Justice speeds up plans to give them support staff.
The threat by chief and senior magistrates to ignore their administrative duties comes as the department finalised its plans on a new court management system this week. Unlike high court judges, magistrates have a host of administrative functions, ranging from implementing budgets to ordering toilet paper.
“We simply cannot afford to relieve chief magistrates of their administrative duties,” said one justice source. “To do so would throw the courts into complete chaos. The court system will collapse.”
It is understood the department wants to spend three years reshaping the magistracy to shift administrative tasks to court managers so that magistrates can concentrate on their cases. The shake-up will entail re-grading the civil service ranks of chief magistrates, who currently enjoy extra perks because of their extra administrative duties.
But chief and senior magistrates want this to happen within three months, claiming their administrative and judicial functions have to be separated to honour their constitutionally enshrined independence. Cape Town Chief Magistrate Bertus Jooste last week raised the issue with members of the Human Rights Commission on a visit to his court. But the Magistrates Commission says there is little it can do except lobby the Minister of Justice to speed up the process, which had already been approved in principle in 1998.
Magistrates Commission representative Hans Meier said the availability and training of administrative staff was a major problem. He declined to comment on whether the commission would take steps against magistrates who summarily refused to carry out administrative duties.
At the heart of the dispute lies the blurring of the roles of magistrates, prosecutors and clerks during apartheid years. Magistrates only needed to pass a two-month course after matric to sit on the bench. In many little towns it became common practice to appoint his wife as clerk of the court.
Recently, relations between those who on a day-to-day basis shared administrative duties with the clerk of the court – stenographers, interpreters and police court orderlies – turned hostile because of turf battles.
Yet few courts have what it would take: a clerk for each court room to, among others, record daily appearances, write the magistrate’s name on the docket, summons witnesses or accused and issue Legal Aid Board referrals.
Currently, the clerical workload in the court central offices is often stretched beyond capacity because of paperwork arising from family violence protection orders and maintenance matters.
If magistrates unilaterally stop administrative work, justice observers say, smaller and rural courts will be worst hit, as they often operate only with a skeleton administrative staff. Although some courts like Cape Town and Wynberg already have appointed court managers, little has changed at Gauteng courts.
Instead officials are struggling to break out of a culture where the chief magistrate rules the roost.