Court strikes Malema’s constitutional challenge off roll ... for now

Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema’s constitutional challenge to the Riotous Assemblies Act was removed from the roll in the High Court in Pretoria yesterday – for the allocation of a special date.

The application was supposed to have been heard before Judge Sulet Potterill, but could not proceed because legal arguments would take up more than a day and a judge would have to be allocated by the deputy judge president to deal with it.

Malema is facing separate charges under the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 in the Bloemfontein and Newcastle magistrate’s courts, for his calls on EFF supporters to illegally occupy land.

Both cases have been repeatedly postponed, pending the final outcome of the EFF’s constitutional challenge to the Act, which can take years to reach finalisation, as the Constitutional Court will have the final say on it.

The EFF maintained the apartheid-era law was outdated and was historically used in the 1960s to put many liberation fighters behind bars.

The party has accused the state of using the Act to try to silence its critics.

The charges related to, among others, EFF’s elective conference of 2014 and incidents in 2016 when Malema encouraged land grabs, saying the land belonged to the country’s black African majority and whites could not claim ownership of the land.

In 2016, Malema again told supporters outside the Bloemfontein Magistrate’s Court to “take any beautiful piece of land” they saw, because it was taken from blacks “by genocide”.

In July last year, he told supporters outside the Newcastle Magistrate’s Court to “occupy land because they have failed to give you the land” and said he was not scared to go to prison because of the land question.

Former president Kgalema Motlanthe, as the chairperson of a panel established to assess the viability of South African laws, has called for review of the Act.

He described the Act as outdated and an anachronism that belonged to the past – and had no place in a democratic country.