Six top South African judges on Saturday resigned their posts in Swaziland after the tiny kingdom’s prime minister questioned their authority over the country’s monarch, a news report said here.
Judge President Leon Steyn and five other judges who head the country’s Appeals Court said they were ”left with no alternative but to resign” following a statement by Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini on Friday.
State radio has quoted Dlamini as saying that the judges were being used by ”forces opposed to” Swaziland’s monarchy.
The prime minister said a recent ruling by the judges, in which they overturned a forced removal ordered by the king, undermined Africa’s last absolute monarch and the decrees he has been
promulgating.
Dlamini said the conduct of the judges was frustrating the king as it had resulted in some of his powers taken away by the ruling.
But said Steyn: ”By his actions and issuing the statement the prime minister has made it impossible for the judges of the Appeal Court to continue serving in the kingdom of Swaziland.”
”We are left with no alternative but to resign office, and the prime minister has been duly advised by our position,” he told the Swazi News.
Steyn said Dlamini’s statement was ”not only outrageous but they were insulting the intelligence of the judges of his court.”
”The statement that the government believes the judges were influenced by outside forces and have not acted independently is far from the truth,” he said.
The judiciary, based on western law principles and the
traditional government in the small country, sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique, has been at loggerheads over a recent ruling affecting a small community in the east of the country.
Some 200 citizens last week won an appeal to return to land from which they were evicted in 2000 after they refused to accept King Mswati III’s elder brother, Prince Maguga, as the chief in the
area.
Mswati then ordered their removal by decree. – Sapa-AFP