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Public has until November 27 to provide feedback on revised JSC interview guidelines

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The Judicial Service Commission (JSC) is revising its guidelines for selecting candidates as judges and for senior positions on the bench, and the public has been given until 27 November to comment on the revised guidelines.

Some of the guidelines propose giving more power to the Chief Justice, who chairs the JSC, to disallow certain questions he deemed unfair to candidates. This revision comes amid growing criticism of the JSC’s handling of its interviews.

The commission came under attack for the way it handled the interviews for the position of Chief Justice earlier this year. The JSC has also come under attack for allowing those who make themselves available for judicial appointment to be publicly humiliated by the questions posed to them.

Some of the JSC critics have even suggested that politicians drawn from parliament who are members of the JSC should be excluded from the process of interviewing prospective judges and those judges who make themselves available for senior positions.

Economic Freedom Fighters leader and member of the commission, Julius Malema grilled then Deputy Chief Justice, Raymond Zondo, during his interview for the position of Chief Justice over his relationship with former president Jacob Zuma as well as Zondo’s concerns about Malema’s infamous ‘kill for Zuma” remarks.

The Judges Matter campaign has welcomed the publication of the revised guidelines for the JSC. The research and advocacy officer for the organisation, Mbekezeli Benjamin explains why.

“For many years, we have identified a lack of guidelines and criteria as a key flaw in the judicial service appointments. The important thing is that the guidelines set out the kind of qualities that the Judicial Service Commission looks for when appointing judges to a court. These qualities include appropriate legal qualities, experience, integrity and independence. These are all important qualities for all our judges to have,” says Benjamin.

He adds that they hope the guidelines will help the chairperson of the JSC overrule questions by commissioners that he deems irrelevant to the criteria for judicial office.

“An important aspect of this criteria is the form of an enforcement mechanism in that the Chief Justice has the power and the duty to overlook the questions from the commissioners that do not relate to the criteria. For a long time the JSC has faced a lot of criticism for the kind of questions that are sometimes inappropriate to answer during the interviews,” adds Benjamin.

At the beginning of November, the JSC announced its call for nominations for the April 2023 round of judicial interviews.

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