Legal Aid strike possible, Parliament told

The report says industrial action at the board would set back court rolls still further and would have a disastrous effect on the backlog of trial cases in the courts. Board chairman Judge Dunstan Mlambo told Parliament’s Justice Committee yesterday that ‘there are rumblings and do not be surprised if there is industrial action’. Mlambo said salaries were a major problem because, in the first place, they were too low to attract legal professionals when in competition with the private sector. The salaries of legal professionals at the Justice Department and the NPA had been upgraded, but the board had not been given money to provide similar increases for its staff, he said. Full Business Day report

Some of the problems facing the justice system were highlighted yesterday by Inspecting Judge of Prisons Nathan Erasmus. According to a report in The Mercury, he spoke passionately about the need for dispensing justice that took SA’s context into account. He also spoke of the need for better prisons and programmes that would help prisoners to reform. Addressing Parliament’s Committee on Security and Constitutional Affairs, the judge said that in his opinion the justice system faces a number of crises. ‘One of them is that we don’t always understand in which context we dispense justice,’ he said. In terms of sentencing in line with the principles of restorative justice, the judge said the judiciary itself ‘has not transformed sufficiently.’ The judge called for a total revamp or renovation of most of the country’s prisons, saying they were never meant to be reformation centres but rather ‘warehouses of people’. Full report in The Mercury (subscription needed)

Meanwhile, the DA wants the shoddy performance of the courts to come under scrutiny in Parliament. It says it is going to request a special debate in Parliament about the matter, according to its justice spokesperson Sheila Camerer. She was responding to NPA head Vusi Pikoli\'s report in this regard to the National Assembly\'s Justice Committee last week, says a report on the IoL site. Among other things, the committee was told court sitting hours at all three levels had steadily decreased over the past three years, so that District Courts sat only for 4.02 hours a day, whereas the goal was 4.45 hours. Regional Courts sat for 3.57 hours, also failing to meet their goal of 4.30 hours, and the High Courts sat for only 3.18 hours when their goal was four hours. Finalisation rates for cases had dropped in all courts, with 38% of all cases in the High Courts having been on the roll for more than a year. Outstanding court rolls and backlogs had grown so that the lower courts currently carried 209 572 cases with an official backlog (cases over a year old) of 36 322. On average, appeals could take five years to finalise, while finalising cases by plea bargaining was also decreasing. Full report on IoL site