Mr Neelan Karikan, President of the Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa.
This page is the one JASA wants pinned next to the tea-break cartoon. The Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa exists for magistrates. Not as a slogan. As a duty. District magistrates, senior magistrates, regional magistrates, acting magistrates, additional magistrates, and the colleagues who keep a periodical court alive on a Thursday in a town the Gazette still misspells — they are why this alliance was formed, and they are why it will not go quiet.
Section 165 of the Constitution vests judicial authority in the courts and requires every organ of state to assist and protect those courts. Section 166 lists the Magistrates’ Courts in the same sentence as the Constitutional Court. Van Rooyen v The State 2002 (5) SA 246 (CC) already held that magistrates are judicial officers, and that the arrangements under which they are appointed, paid, housed, transferred and disciplined form part of their independence. JASA’s work is to make those sentences true in a building that still has a dead recording machine.
We will represent the rights of magistrates across South Africa at every level that the Constitution and the Magistrates Act 90 of 1993 give us. That means the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office-Bearers and the Presidency on pay. It means Parliament, which must still approve the magistrates’ remuneration notice under section 12 of the Magistrates Act. It means the Magistrates’ Commission on appointments, transfers, leave and discipline. It means the Department of Justice and the Office of the Chief Justice on Phase 2, security, infrastructure and the definition of “court”. It means a colleague who has gone quiet, and a family that is carrying a reserved-judgment list home.
The pledge, in one block
JASA will speak for magistrates in every province and at every rank. We will not trade a district court for a headline. We will not accept that a magistrate is a departmental grade. We will take the structural pay gap, the workload, the security scare, the dead machine and the mental cost of the roll to every forum that will hear us — and to a court if a forum will not. We will do it without trying a colleague in a newsletter, and without leaving a junior officer alone with a week of GBV trials.
If you sit in Gqeberha or in Giyani, in Booysens or in Butterworth, in a regional court or in a periodical court that sits twice a month, this alliance is yours. Write to president@judicialalliance.org. Bring the vacancy list, the broken lift, the security scare, the judgment that has sat too long. We will put it on a page that has footnotes, and we will take it to the desk that can move.