Businessman Hugh Glenister has thrown in the towel, but is hopeful that someone else will pick up his legal challenge to the scrapping of the Scorpions, his attorney, Kevin Louis, said on Thursday.
”Mr Glenister’s out. He’s not going any further,” Louis said.
On Wednesday Glenister received a double blow when both the Constitutional Court and the Cape High Court ruled against his urgent applications to stop the Scorpions Bills being put to the vote in Parliament.
Louis said Glenister was disappointed at the rulings, but had a ”very philosophical attitude”.
”He knew from the beginning that a pre-enactment challenge was nigh-impossible to get right,” he said.
Glenister’s mission, and his brief to his legal team, had been to prevent the Bills being passed through the National Assembly.
”We always knew it was going to be a long shot bringing this type of application, before the Bills had been through the parliamentary process,” Louis said.
A number of issues, including that of the nature of public participation in the legislative process, and the fact that MPs investigated by the Scorpions would likely be voting on the Bills on Thursday, still offered grounds for a constitutional challenge.
Glenister’s legal team had already had discussions with representatives of the Helen Suzman Foundation, and it appeared that there was a possibility the foundation could launch a challenge once the Bills had been through the parliamentary process and become law.
Other organisations, such as Institute for Democracy in South Africa and the Centre for Constitutional Democracy, might also weigh in, he said.
”I’m hopeful. I would imagine there will be a couple,” he said.
He said one of the things Glenister had achieved was to lay a lot of the groundwork for whoever came after him.
Among other things, there was now a clear ruling from the Constitutional Court on how it interpreted the doctrine of separation of powers.
Glenister had also aroused an immense amount of interest in the Bills, resulting in possibly more public submissions to Parliament than on any other legislation since 1994.
Louis said the Constitutional Court challenge would cost Glenister ”a bomb”.
The exact costs still had to be worked out. But his lawyers would give Glenister a discount, he promised. ”I think he deserves one.”
He also said he intended to ask for written reasons from Cape High Court Judge James Yekiso, for his ruling on Wednesday night. — Sapa