Chief Justice Mogoeng, an end to an erratic era - The chief justice we didn’t know we needed protected the independence of the judiciary through dark days but leaves an ambivalent legacy
Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng retires within days. We don’t know who will replace him and may not know for months but the legal community’s relief at the end of his tenure is unconcealed, and perhaps echoed by his own.
The law impaired the dignity of both unmarried fathers and their children by devaluing the bond they shared, the court said, as it stepped away from an outdated distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. Rather, as it stood section 10 recognised “the undocumented, somewhat informal and unevidenced nature of a relationship other than marriage out of which a child is born”. If the law treated unmarried fathers differently it was, bluntly put, their own doing.
As he leaves office, one of the complaints about the current state of the apex court is that its many minority rulings do not further jurisprudential development, but often confuse issues because its justices lack a common understanding of fundamental points of law. Constitutional law expert Pierre de Vos said that looking back, there is a sense of ambivalence about Mogoeng’s legacy. Any overview suggests that the majority of his judgments “were more or less in line with the thinking of the rest of the court”.
But in 2015, after the government defied a high court order to detain Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Mogoeng led the country’s most senior judges to aand told the media afterwards: “The constitutional reality is that it is the responsibility that rests on the shoulders of the judiciary to interpret the constitution and the law. That will never change.”
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