Dear colleagues, and hello to everyone who walks with us — attorneys, advocates, prosecutors, traditional leaders, court staff, and the families who still wait on hard wooden benches when September opens the door.
I write as Mr Neelan Karikan, Founder and President of the Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa. If you have opened this newsletter with a cup of tea after a long roll, that is exactly who it is for.
September in this country is a spring month. The light changes before the law does. There is a lesson in that for a bench that is asked to hold other people’s worst days. Indigenous succulents do not ask the climate to be fair. They store what they can, they keep their shape, and they flower when the season finally remembers them. A judicial officer is not a plant. But a judicial officer who is never watered — in pay, in pension, in a working building, in a moment of quiet — will not flower either.
Mr Neelan Karikan • Founder & President of JASA
Senior Magistrate and District Court Judge
JASA is not a trade union in the ordinary sense. We are a covenant. We exist so that the people who sit in Magistrates’ Courts are not left to argue, alone, for the dignity the Constitution already promised them.
Section 165 is written in plain language. The courts are independent. They apply the law without fear, favour or prejudice. Organs of state must assist and protect those courts. It does not say “except the court down the road that hears the maintenance enquiry, the protection order and the dog that was left in a bakkie in January heat.”
This issue keeps the arguments you already know and adds the dockets that arrive in September with the light. Animal welfare is not a soft subject for a lower court. A protection order is not a form. Wellness is not a poster in a passage. Indigenous plants are not decoration — they are a constitutional environment, and they are being stolen from the Karoo while we write reserved judgments. And because a bench that never laughs is a bench that breaks, there is a cartoon, a quiz, and a page you can write on.
Wish one another a great spring month. Walk before the roll if you can. Put a small living thing on the windowsill of chambers. Telephone a colleague who has gone quiet. The Constitution did not appoint a machine. It appointed you.
With respect, and with the usual cup of tea — Neelan Karikan Founder & President, Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa