Durban – Women judges have called for a firm set of criteria to be developed to determine who served as acting judges, so that these appointments were not made at the whim of high court judge presidents.
Currently, anyone who had not spent time as an acting judge was unlikely to be considered a suitable candidate by the Judicial Service Commission, but few women were afforded this opportunity.
The call was made by the South African chapter of the International Association of Women Judges during their annual conference held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal at the weekend.
It would ensure that more women would qualify to apply for positions on the Bench, Professor Managay Reddi, Dean of Law at UKZN, said.
Reddi was speaking to The Mercury on the final day of the conference, which focused on violence against women, and at which Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was a guest speaker.
Reddi said, in discussions on the role women judges and magistrates played in the fight against gender-based violence, that the conference focused on the difficulties encountered by women aspiring to the Bench.
“The practice seems to be that anybody who has not spent time as an acting judge is unlikely to be found appointable by the JSC,” Reddi said.
“The appointment of acting judges is in the hands of the judge presidents of the various high courts, who are not answerable to anybody for the acting appointments they make.”
Reddi said that the transformation of the judiciary was not merely about equal gender representation, but about ensuring that certain factors would be properly considered in decisions involving female complainants or victims.
“I’m referring to factors such as why women stay in abusive relationships, or the factors that need to be taken into account when abused women kill their abusers in circumstances that don’t strictly conform to the definition of self-defence.”
She said that few men understood why a woman would kill her abuser at a time when he might not have been posing a direct threat to her.
Reddi said the judiciary was better placed than other entities to affect meaningfully the fight against gender violence, because it could interpret and apply the law.
leanne.jansen@inl.co.za
The Mercury
