All Rise , livre ebook

Pan Macmillan South Africa - Dikgang Moseneke

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

208 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

At the young age of fifteen, Dikgang Moseneke was imprisoned for participating in anti-apartheid activities. During his ten years of incarceration, he completed his schooling by correspondence and earned two university degrees. Afterwards he studied law at the University of South Africa.

After some years in general legal practice and at the Bar, and a brief segue into business, Moseneke was persuaded that he would best serve the country’s young democracy by taking judicial office.

All Rise covers his years on the bench, with particular focus on his fifteen-year term as a judge at South Africa’s apex court, the Constitutional Court, including as the deputy chief justice. His insights into the Constitutional Court’s structures, the personalities peopling it, the values it embodies, the human dramas that shook it and the cases that were brought to it make for fascinating reading.

From the Constitutional Court of Arthur Chaskalson to the Mogoeng Mogoeng era, Moseneke’s understated but astute commentary is a reflection on the country’s ongoing but not altogether comfortable journey to a better life for all.

Sujets

justice

Constitutional

Philosophie et théologie

Republic of South Africa

21st century

South Africa

Memoir

20th century

LAW

LLB

Constitution

Afrique du Sud

Informations

Publié par	Pan Macmillan South Africa
Date de parution	02 août 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770107342
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0391€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Praise for All Rise
‘ All Rise is fascinating on many levels. Moseneke’s industry and energy in producing it are welcome. The book makes a serious and positive contribution to South Africans’ knowledge and insight into many interesting issues. All Rise shines an important light on key aspects of governance in South Africa in the first decades of the existence of the Constitutional Court. And the shining of that light is a marker, as Justice Moseneke would have it, of the hygiene of South Africa’s democratic project.’
– Anton Katz , Daily Maverick
‘As a member of the team that drafted the interim Constitution, Moseneke’s insights into the Constitutional Court’s structure, the values it embodies and the cases that were brought to it make for fascinating reading.’
– Orielle Berry , Cape Argus
‘ All Rise is as much about Moseneke’s 15-year judicial career as it is a bio graphy of South Africa’s post-apartheid jurisprudence and a civic education manual on how the judiciary, particularly the Constitutional Court, works. It also casts a spotlight on the laborious process of judging and the rancour that accompany the role, especially in an era chaperoned by a self-serving political elite whose misdeeds threaten the very survival of the democratic project.’
– Mukoni Ratshitanga , Citizen
‘Moseneke writes thoughtfully, with flashes of humour and vivid characterisation. As a result, these memories spring from the page and engage the reader in the challenges of legal reasoning, giving telling insights into the birth pangs of the new South Africa.’
– Patricia McCracken , Farmer’s Weekly

All Rise
A Judicial Memoir
Dikgang Moseneke
picador africa

First published in 2020 by Picador Africa
This edition published in 2021 by Picador Africa
an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag x 19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
isbn 978 1 77010 733 5
ebook isbn 978 1 77010 734 2
© 2020, 2021 Dikgang Moseneke
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the details, facts, names and places mentioned, as an autobiography this book is partly based on memory. The publisher and author welcome feedback, comments and/or corrections that could further enrich the book.
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Russell Martin
Indexing by Christopher Merrett
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg
Cover design by publicide
Cover photograph by Gallo Images/The Times/Daniel Born

This judicial memoir would not have been possible if I had not been privileged by my country to serve its people as a servant of the public.
Perforce, I dedicate this memoir to all the people of our land and of Africa who deserve respect, freedom and social justice, absent which, I pray, they will know and will revolt so that they All Rise.

Contents
foreword
prologue
EARLY CAREER
1 Choosing law
2 The right to robe
3 Detour to the bench
4 A permanent appointment
5 A formidable workload
6 Free and fair
7 Constitutional Court: Genesis and nomination
CHASKALSON COURT
8 Who will guard the guardians?
9 The class of ’95
10 Reporting for dut y
11 New ways of doing things
12 A clean slate
13 Judicial architecture reformed
14 A common purpose
15 Tenure and intellectual bonding
LANGA COURT
16 Second-generation leaders
17 Clouds gathering, storm brewing
18 The Hlophe matter
19 Jurisprudence – a full repertoire
20 ‘You see, Sboshwa …’
NGCOBO COURT
21 A new political elite
MOGOENG COURT
22 Banishing the elephant
23 Harmony and turbulence
24 Challenging the courts
25 Jurisprudence amid executive hostilities
26 Final sitting
AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT
27 The Life Esidimeni Commission of Inquiry
28 ‘Retirement’
acknowledgements
appendix
farewell address
picture section

Foreword
W hen Dikgang Moseneke served out the last day of his fifteen-year term limit as a justice of the Constitutional Court in 2016, a momentous period – perhaps, even, an epoch – had come to an end.
One of the last significant links to the Chaskalson Court, those eleven first justices President Nelson Mandela appointed in 1994, had been lost. The court felt shaken, a little uncertain, like a family losing a wise, generous big brother.
I was privileged to share the court’s bench with Dikgang for nearly eight years. In combination of intellect, personality, jurisprudential force and physical presence, he was the golden heart of the court. In keenly divided decisions, when Dikgang cast his vote, you knew that the force of his reasoning and personality would often draw two or three colleagues with him. He and I differed, sometimes profoundly, occasionally fractiously. But our differences were rare. For the most part, I was honoured to be his ally, his sparring partner and, in some momentous interventions, his co-author.
Dikgang led the forces in the court who sought fair-minded development of the common law, generous-spirited application of constitutional principles, and unflinching insistence on constitutional observance by the legislature and the executive.
His illustrious presence in the court was as large and forceful as his impact outside it. His was a persistently generous, warm-hearted, forward-looking, richly-giving spirit.
In this splendid memoir, a fitting sequel to his first volume, My Own Liberator , Dikgang recounts in abundance the court’s bloody battles, monumental achievements and sweet moments. He does so congenially, encompassingly and invitingly, taking readers on a gracious and considerate journey into South Africa’s legal history, the roots of the Constitution, the mind of a judge, and the workings of the court.
There are self-knowing asides. There are light touches and, very occasionally, crests of humour; but, for the most part, Dikgang’s pen exudes his life’s purpose: to bring social justice, good governance, and enlightened conditions of autonomy to the people of our country.
What an extraordinary person. Imprisoned on Robben Island at fifteen by a pitiless apartheid judge, he gained his school-leaving and first law qualification while in prison. He then surmounted the rigidly tiered echelons of the legal world, facing off bigotry and winning acclaim for the sheer force of his mind, lawyerliness and personality.
His memoir shares with the reader moments of acute poignancy. In the midst of a masterly overview of the Constitutional Court’s main achievements while he was part of it, Dikgang entrusts the reader with painfully personal moments – when he was passed over for the post to which his every virtue and capacity entitled him, the chief justiceship.
In a speech at the court’s dazzling farewell dinner for Dikgang, I compared him to Oliver Deneys Schreiner, the great anti-apartheid appellate judge in the 1950s, whom the apartheid government passed over repeatedly for chief justice.
The similarity lies not only in the due recognition of high office that each was unjustly denied. It consists also in the force and lasting importance of their large-spirited impact on South Africa’s legal heritage. In the high moral and constitutional crisis of Collins v Minister of the Interior in 1957, Schreiner’s dissent showed that South African legal principle afforded enough, just enough, to repel some of apartheid’s most shameful enactments.
Dikgang’s jurisprudence helped nurture that promise into full constitutional florescence.
But there was one telling difference. When the apartheid government deliberately flooded the court with five new appointments to dilute its determined resistance to cancelling the coloured vote, Schreiner and his colleagues refused to play bowls (yes, bowls) with the new arrivals, and refrained from socialising with them.
Not Dikgang. These pages are near-unceasingly generous. They depict the intricate relationship Dikgang formed with Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, after he was passed over for the third and final time. With Mogoeng, Dikgang worked in close collaboration, association and alliance during the critical years of the Jacob Zuma presidency, as the forces of malignancy and corruption sought to thieve from us our constitutional prize and deprive our people of the rule of law and of the means it offers to a just and even society.
Dikgang’s pen is not without some occasional acerbity. Memorably, but laconically, he invites Minister Jeff Radebe, who as President Zuma’s minister of justice carried out much of the unseemly grubby work of his political master, to account for it. It is a call Radebe may choose to evade, but its resonance will echo in our history.
More significantly, even, Dikgang sets out in remorseless detail the most shameful episode in our democracy’s judicial history: the events surrounding the visits to the court in the first half of 2008, while important litigation by Zuma was pending for decision, by Cape Judge President John Hlophe. As the clouds of fierce controversy continue to swirl around Hlophe’s head, what exactly happened during those two visits has never been decisively determined. Why? Because of a dozen years of points-taking, obstruction, delays, evasions and filibustering.
Dikgang’s memoir soberly gives readers the incontestable facts. He