No impeachment inquiries for Hlophe, Goliath
Neither judge president John Hlophe nor his deputy, Patricia Goliath, will face an impeachment inquiry over their explosive accusations against each other. At least for now. That’s after two of the three judges on the Judicial Service Commission’s conduct committee decided the complaints should be subjected to investigations under section 17 of the Judicial Service Commission Act, which focuses on serious but not impeachable offences.
Neither Western Cape High Court judge president John Hlophe nor his deputy Patricia Goliath will face any impeachment inquiry after they had made explosive accusations against each other.
At least for now.
That is after two of the three judges on the Judicial Service Commission’s conduct committee decided that the complaints should be subjected to investigation under section 17 of the Judicial Service Commission Act, which focuses on serious, but not impeachable, offences by judges.
Judges Dumisani Zondi and Phineas Mojapelo’s decision does not rule out the possibility that Hlophe or Goliath may face impeachment inquiries after the section 17 investigations. But it does mean that any potential impeachment process linked to the damaging Hlophe-Goliath saga will take much longer to complete.
The third judge, Nambitha Dambuza, disagreed with Zondi and Mojapelo, finding that both Hlophe’s and Goliath’s complaints justified possible impeachment inquiries.
Zondi and Mojapelo said their decision not to recommend gross misconduct inquiries into either Hlophe or Goliath was partially motivated by the deputy judge president’s failure to respond to Hlophe’s accusations against her, or to send her lawyers to appear before them nearly a month ago.
At the time, Goliath’s lawyer, Nick Muller, stressed that there was no obligation on her or her lawyers to appear before the conduct committee.
The decision by the conduct committee comes after Goliath lodged a 14-page complaint against Hlophe, accusing him of trying to influence the appointment of judges and trying to get judges who were favourably disposed towards then president Jacob Zuma to preside over the crucial intergovernmental nuclear agreement between SA and Russia that had come before the court.
She also claimed Hlophe assaulted an unnamed junior judge — now identified as judge Mushtak Parker — and that he was then influenced by two other judges not to lay criminal charges against Hlophe.
After Parker’s claims that he may have “misremembered” the incident, 10 of the high court’s judges recently refused to share a bench with him, citing his “apparent lack of integrity”.
Hlophe in turn said Goliath’s accusations against him were made up and a “malicious and bad-faith attempt to generate public outrage, lynching and condemnation of my leadership of the division that would support calls for my immediate suspension and removal”.
Hlophe’s lawyer, Barnabas Xulu, told Business Day on Tuesday that he welcomed the conduct committee’s decision.
Muller did not respond to requests for comment.
Chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng on Tuesday hit out at criticism that either he or the judiciary he leads have failed to deal adequately with the two gross misconduct complaints against Hlophe: one brought by the Constitutional Court in 2008, and the other by Goliath earlier in 2020.
In reference to calls for Hlophe and Goliath to be placed on special leave pending the resolution of their complaints against each other, Mogoeng said it is “highly irresponsible and disingenuous to pretend that the chief justice has powers that he doesn’t have”.
“I don’t have the power just to grant leave to any colleague. I don’t even have the power to grant myself leave,” he said.
He added that the major delays in the finalisation of the 2008 complaint against Hlophe were either caused by litigation or disputes over the state’s funding of Hlophe’s legal costs.