Courts will continue their work during shutdown

The South African court system will likely remain up and running – at least to some degree – during the upcoming national lockdown, with President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday night announcing that “safety and security services protecting people and property” would continue through this period.

While the Chief Justice was on Tuesday yet to pronounce on his plans for the three-week-long forced stay-away, “the services required for the functioning of courts” are identified as essential services in the Labour Act, and, says the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution’s Lawson Naidoo, with good reason.

“Law and order have to be maintained, even in a time of disaster,” Naidoo told The Citizen yesterday, “As the president made clear in his address on Monday night, any infringements of the regulations that are being promulgated will be pursued and prosecuted. And in order for that to happen, we need to have at least a skeleton court structure in place”.

Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng last Tuesday issued a directive outlining new measures to be put in place in the country’s courts in a bid to try and curb the spread of Covid-19. These included, among others, increased sanitising and disinfecting measures and not allowing more than 100 people into a courtroom at once.

Following a meeting of the Provincial Efficiency Enhancement Committee, Gauteng Judge President Dunstan Mlambo then last Friday announced additional measures for the courts in his jurisdiction, “in view of the partial and in some instances lack of adequate provisioning of health and safety materials in the court houses as mentioned in the directive issued by the Chief Justice”.

Mlambo said all criminal trials enrolled over the next two weeks, were to be postponed until at least mid-April. He said matters relating to first appearances, bail applications and cases for which “special arrangements” had been made, were to be dealt with in the normal course, but that the Audio Visual Remand (AVR) system would be used for these cases.

There have also since been reports of mass postponements at the Randburg Regional Court and the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, and Naidoo said yesterday there may well be further conditions imposed on court functioning in the wake of the announcement of the national lockdown.

He said weighing up the various rights which the authorities were obliged to uphold – including the rights to live in a protected, healthy environment and to be brought before a court within 48 hours of arrest – was an “incredibly difficult” task at a time like this.

“We’re dealing with a set of circumstances that we’ve never encountered before,” he said, “But  I think there are creative mechanisms being considered to ensure that people have access to justice even if it’s not in the way that it has been conducted in the past, with people appearing in court”.

These mechanisms include the use of the AVR system, introduced in 2011, as well as the use of CaseLines, a new online filing system currently being piloted in courts across Gauteng. Naidoo said yesterday that he believed recent steps towards adopting and using new technology to enhance the efficiency of the justice system, like those towards the AVR system and CaseLines, would assist the courts in weathering this storm.

“I think that this is an opportunity for the legal system as a whole to make greater use of these measures and to ensure that the systems can be tested during this time,” he added, “Hopefully our experiences now will lead to greater efficiencies in the court system in the longer term”.

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