COURTS VIOLATING HUMAN RIGHTS

I was not surprised to read that the country’s first lady judge had said the Constitution was being violated on the election of women in the kingdom. Being the person she is, I know she is capable of bringing up such issues.

She is the first to raise this issue, and has spoken the truth, in spite of the attorney general having said what was being done is fair. Even his explanation of affirmative action left me confused. Confusing as it is, the bottom line is that womenfolk of this country are denied equal opportunities with men. The elected women will not stand a chance of being appointed ministers like their male colleagues, but the attorney general sees nothing wrong with that.

How I wish her views on upholding the Constitution would rub off onto her colleagues on the bench. That brings to the fore the recently -concluded bail matter of Sipho Shongwe. Some will say but he was afforded an opportunity to post bail by the Supreme Court. In my view, this was not supposed to have happened if the rights, as provided by the Constitution, were respected by our courts.

The Constitution is clear that every person or individual is presumed innocent until found guilty by the courts. This right is for every person, irrespective of his or her standing in society. We are aware that there are limitations, but those limitations should not be used to deny people their constitutional rights.
The chronology of events culminating to the long delay in granting the bail to this man makes me believe that he has been denied justice.

Remember that justice delayed is justice denied, so they say. That it took the Supreme Court to grant bail in this case means justice for Shongwe was delayed, which means it was denied. What set the injustice in motion was when the chief justice decided to speak against the right to innocence when he said judges should not award bail to certain people who had committed certain offences. So, it was not surprising when we saw justice being denied to Shongwe. I do not want to go to the interference that we saw during the case, especially from the office of the chief justice. I was happy when the Supreme Court also mentioned this, even though shortly after that, the way the appeal was noted and stay of execution granted created some suspicions.

What is happening to Shongwe is not the first of its kind and when I saw this happening, I asked myself if we are not back to the Ramodibedi era. The erstwhile chief justice abused his powers to deny a right to representation to Bhantshana Gwebu. He further went on to use Justice Mpendulo Simelane to deny Bheki Makhubu and Thulani Maseko their right to be presumed innocent. Even after granting them bail, he denied them that right. I will not forget what Simelane did in the case of Mario Masuku and Maxwell Dlamini. Our bench has a bad record when it comes to human rights but I applaud the Supreme Court for what it did.

The South African courts made me envious on Monday, when they issued a judgment that protesting was right. They said it was a form of expression. They even struck down the provision of the law that required people to get authority to protest. This was the Constitutional Court of that country and they said limitations to this right should be as minimal as possible.

I thought to myself, here is a court promoting human rights and protecting the people’s rights from limitations, which made me think about our courts. On a number of occasions our Industrial Court has stopped workers from protesting and cited flimsy reasons for such. The court basically denies the people their right to express themselves through protests.

Their freedom of expression is curtailed by the courts which are basically supposed to promote such rights.
This behaviour goes down to even the magistrates courts. A number of people have been sent to custody by magistrates, some of whom are known that they do not dispense justice to the people but do something else.

The right to liberty of a number of people is tempered with for no good reason. But because the leaders of our justice system are also violating human rights, nothing is done to the magistrates. A number of complaints have been lodged against certain magistrates but nothing has been done to them. The judges have even developed an attitude that whenever there is a review from certain magistrates they will grant it.

Yes the people are afforded their rights then but the justice is already delayed by then and people’s rights have been violated. Others already had their lives disturbed greatly. That’s why I wish the respect for the Constitution, as pointed out by our lady judge, permeates to all her colleagues and then have the courts respecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights therein.

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