Happy Heritage Day, colleagues.
A good late-spring morning to every officer still carrying a court.
The official theme of Heritage Day 2026 is Celebrating Our Living Heritage: Strengthening the Ties That Bind Us. Living heritage is not a costume worn on a Thursday. It is the language spoken at first appearance, the customary duty that still funds a child when a parent has left the room, the interpreter who makes section 35 more than a courtesy, and the colleague who still opens a door for the officer carrying the court.
This Heritage week the Madlanga Commission stands in a longer season. A year of public revelations is being given time to become a proper report. The country is being asked to look, and then to realign — not to panic.
This edition is not a reprint of the last one with a flag on the cover. The last sitting days of a public inquiry, the East Rand families who are burying daughters, the traditional leaders who remain constitutional office-bearers, and a practice note on rehabilitation after sentence — those are this week’s pages. JASA is still the room in which magistrates speak to one another as officers. Heritage Day is a good day to remember that.
Mr Neelan Karikan, Founder & President of JASA.
This issue stays with the work you already know, and then walks a little further. A year of revelations, and the time now given to finish the report. The deaths of women on the East Rand — whom we mourn in this edition with condolence — and the discipline the Criminal Procedure Act still requires of a court that has not heard the evidence. Maintenance, which is how a child’s week is funded. Artificial intelligence. And a guest essay by Reverend Michael Pillay on rehabilitation and restorative justice. Heritage Day, which is a Thursday the roll does not own. All of that is the same week.
A nation that can stand in one place without a finding — at a braai, in a language, in a court that still listens — is practising the same discipline the bench already knows. Ubuntu is not a slogan for the programme. It is the working method of a room in which every person is still a person.
With respect, and with every good wish for Heritage Day and the week that follows —
Neelan Karikan
Founder & President, Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa