The chairperson of the General Council of the Bar, advocate Norman Arendse, on Wednesday denied being part of any conspiracy to discredit John Hlophe, Judge President of the Cape division.
”As far as any allegations of a conspiracy are concerned, I’m not part of such a conspiracy because if I wanted to, I could have outed on this issue some time ago. I didn’t. I thought I acted responsibly by writing to the chief justice because it concerns our most senior judge in this division. And that’s where I left it,” Arendse said.
Arendse was responding to media reports that suggested Hlophe had deliberately tried to sabotage his fellow judge and colleague, Wilfred Thring.
Hlophe had allegedly told Arendse that he had given a particular case to Thring in the hope he would err in his judgement and the matter would be overturned on appeal.
The case heard earlier this year saw the Western Cape department of education take the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking Mikro Primary School to court to compel it to accept English-speaking students.
Arendse had appeared for the education department, and Thring ruled against him and in favour of the school in the politically charged matter.
Attempts to get hold of Hlophe on Wednesday proved futile. However, in the Afrikaans paper Die Burger he is quoted as saying that the entire Thring allegation was part of a ”smear campaign” against him.
Hlophe is also at the centre of another storm — he has recently been accused of calling a Cape Town lawyer a ”white shit”.
Last year, Hlophe opened a can of worms when he made allegations of serious racism at the Cape bench, and handed over a report to Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla.
Mabandla’s spokesperson, Kaizer Kganyago, was unavailable for comment on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Arendse confirmed he had written to former chief justice Arthur Chaskalson and his successor, Pius Langa, about the Thring matter in February or March of this year.
”What they do with it or did with it, is up to them, and that’s still my attitude. I’m not going to become embroiled in any media or public spat with anybody,” said Arendse. — Sapa