The Superior Courts Bill rationalises all laws relating to the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court of Appeal and the high courts and in the words of Democratic Alliance MP Dene Smuts gives ‘the chief justice the tools for the job — the task of convening forums of judges with whom he may set the norms and standards for judicial functions and for the efficient functioning of the courts’.
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Business Day
Wyndham Hartley’s article Courts bill ‘a shield from political influence’, was first published in Business Day today and here are some extracts.
THE National Assembly on Thursday took a big step towards insulating the judiciary from political influence by approving the Superior Courts Bill.
Earlier versions of the bill sought to place the administration of the courts in the hands of a politician — the justice minister— but the approved version makes it very clear that this will be the responsibility of the chief justice.
The bill repeals the Supreme Courts Act of 1959 and rationalises all laws relating to the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court of Appeal and the high courts.
Democratic Alliance MP Dene Smuts said on Thursday that the bill, read together with the constitution 17th amendment, gave the first legislative effect to plans for an institutionally independent judicial branch.
Ms Smuts said the bill would repeal a range of existing laws, particularly those of former homelands, under which South Africa’s courts were established in the past.
“It has taken all these years and five ministers of justice since 1994 to finally achieve the rationalisation required by schedule 6(16)(6) of the constitution, which asks for rationalisation to establish a judicial system suited to the constitutional dispensation,” she said. “In addition, it creates the new system of court governance by the judges themselves.”