I write as Mr Neelan Karikan, Founder and President of the Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa. If you have opened this newsletter after a long roll — perhaps with coffee still going cold beside the blotter, or with a printed shortlist and a shirt that feels a little too formal — then it was written with you in mind.
This fortnight the Magistrates Commission sits to interview shortlisted candidates for Regional Court President and Chief Magistrate posts across the Republic. Other colleagues remain in processes that began with the large district-court recruitment. JASA does not appoint. What we can usefully do is quieter: we remind the person who has already been doing the work that an interview is a conversation about a life already lived on the roll, not a trial in which you must prove that you exist.
Chambers, late spring — a robe, a plant, a working blotter.
JASA remains a covenant, not a trade union in the ordinary sense. We exist so that the people who sit in Magistrates’ Courts are not left to argue, alone, for the dignity the Constitution already promised them. Section 165 is still written in plain language. The courts are independent. Organs of state must assist and protect those courts — including the officer whose name is on a shortlist, and the acting magistrate who has been carrying a court that has no permanent name on the door.
This issue stays with the work you already know, and then walks a little further into the files that arrive with the morning. Forensic reports, adoption papers, default requests, the person without a lawyer, the interpreter, the child who will live with the order, and the court that sits when the lights go — all of that is the same week.
With respect, and with every good wish for the week ahead —
Neelan Karikan
Founder & President, Judicial Officers Alliance of South Africa