Gauteng judge president Dunstan Mlambo has expressed “deep” concern over the rising backlog of cases in the province.
This follows reports that the Johannesburg high court is struggling with a backlog of civil cases.
Mlambo said the lack of judicial capacity was a major contributing factor as the workload was too much for judges to handle. He wants more people to be employed to solve the matter.
“You have a judiciary that is capacitated to deal with a certain workload. The workload we’re dealing with is beyond our capacity. We don’t have the judicial posts to manage the workload that’s here. It’s not the first time we’ve said our workload is increasing. We’ve been saying we need the creation of more judicial posts.
“We want to do our work but we are dealing with unenviable workloads and we need a quick response that addresses that in terms of the creation of additional judicial posts that will enable us to ensure that people don’t wait too long to have their matters heard,” he said during an interview with Newzroom Afrika.
Mlambo said some of the cases take four to five years to be heard, adding the judiciary cannot be blamed for this. Most of the civil trials are related to the road accident fund, he said.
“We can’t take the blame. We can deal with whatever we can deal with. We’re not robots, we are humans and we can only deal with so much. If we say we need more judicial posts, we need more judicial posts because we can see what’s happening.”
Mlambo expressed frustration over the role that lawyers play in contributing to this crisis. He alleged some lawyers delay trial dates on purpose for potential financial gain.
“Lawyers insist on having trial dates because it works for them to have matters on trial — it’s more fees in their pockets if they are able to claim trial fees as well.
“Not all the matters that land on the trial roll and are waiting for dates belong there. In fact, more than half of those matters don’t belong there. So, you may shout as members of the media that it’s a crisis or whatever, but the litigants themselves must take the blame for insisting on having trial dates when they can have their matters resolved expeditiously in other ways.”
He urged lawyers to push for their cases to be settled.
“If lawyers would stop insisting on trial dates and instead focus on having their matters settled early, such as by submitting their cases to mediation, it would drastically reduce the civil trial workload of all the courts in South Africa.
“We have a constitution that guarantees fair trial rights. We can’t bulldoze people to say let’s run, we’ve got targets to meet. We’re not chasing targets we are chasing the objective of the constitution to make sure that there’s fair access to justice.”
Innocentia Nkadimeng
www.timeslive.co.za
