SA ‘a nation of laws and not personalities’ – judge

One of SA’s most senior judges has urged a change to the ‘national psyche’ in the fight against corruption and maladministration, legal writer Carmel Rickard notes in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site. Delivering the annual human rights lecture at the University of Stellenbosch’s faculty of law, Justice Mahomed Navsa said the national mindset needed to be instilled with an understanding of the importance of laws and institutions that were ‘fundamental to the success of our democracy’. Navsa, the acting Deputy President of the Supreme Court of Appeal, said that to achieve a deeply-ingrained understanding of and desire to protect the Constitution, continuous public education was needed to ‘bring home the point that ours is a democracy based on the rule of law and that we are a nation of laws and not of personalities’.