Still not enough women at SA’s top court, says judge candidate
“We are not there yet,” Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) justice Mahube Molemela said when asked about the number of women in the judiciary.
Molemela made the comment during Judicial Service Commission (JSC) interviews yesterday.
Molemela is one of eight candidates being interviewed by the JSC for two vacancies in the Constitutional Court.
With four women justices, the highest court is the most transformed it has been in its history.
But Molemela reminded the commission there was still no gender parity and that the constitution’s injunction that the judiciary should “reflect broadly” SA’s population in terms of race and gender had yet to be fulfilled.
Molemela said it had at one stage been argued that there were insufficient women coming forward.
But now, even when competent women were making themselves available, they were not getting the nod, she said.
“So what are we doing?” she asked.
Molemela was praised by her leader at the SCA, deputy president Xola Petse, who said he admired her “fierceness” to dissent from majority decisions.
Earlier, Molemela told the commission about her dissenting judgment in the Morudi case, where, “flying solo”, she had as an acting judge in the SCA held that the principle of audi alteram partem —“to listen to the other side ”— had not been fulfilled in a case where even though the litigants had been present, they had not been given a hearing.
Though she went against the majority in the SCA, her view was upheld by the Constitutional Court, she said.
But, Petse asked, why was she leaving the appellate court so soon?
Here he touched on a matter raised earlier by commissioner Griffiths Madonsela SC and later by chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng: that Molemela was “moving along too quickly ”— according to Madonsela — and did not stay to “build”, according to Mogoeng.
Molemela was appointed to the high court in 2008 and became judge-president in 2015.
In 2018, she was appointed to the SCA.
She responded that three years at the appeal court was sufficient, given that former Constitutional Court justice Kate O’Regan had been appointed to Concourt straight from academia, former Concourt justice Bess Nkabinde from the high court and former Concourt justice Johann Kriegler after two years in the appeal court.
She said each time she moved, she left a gap for a woman to fill.