CJ's ruling wrongly interpreted for eight years

Eswatini’s anti-corruption commission (ACC) has been in a state of virtual paralysis since 2016, following a decision by the Chief Justice, Bheki Maphalala. The commission interpreted the CJ’s decision as saying that the wide-ranging powers given to the commission in terms of the anti-corruption law, were unconstitutional. Faced with that interpretation, the ACC was able to do very little, and corruption in Eswatini has simply soared, unchecked, since then. Now, eight years later, three judges of the High Court have held that the judgment did not in fact declare the Prevention of Corruption Act unconstitutional and that the commission had simply misunderstood what the decision said. In her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, Carmel Rickard looks at what the new decision has found about the CJ’s original ruling – and at the court’s not-so-veiled reprimand of the ACC for going into ‘hibernation’ rather than acting promptly to get clarity on what the CJ had actually meant.

A Matter of Justice

Eswatini judgment