HETN CONDEMNS BRIEFING OF RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGUE LAWYERS
The Higher Education Transformation Network (HETN) acting on behalf of its alumni members, hereby expresses its strongest concern and condemnation for the manner in which government consistently appoints rightwing antitransformation legal ideologues to champion its causes in the courts.
It is our concern that government is increasingly appointing unpatriotic rightwing legal practitioners most of whom are actively involved in internationally spewing out Afriforum / Solidariteit's racist propaganda to the United Nations that there is an ongoing campaign to persecute and discriminate against white citizens in South Africa. Certain government departments have, contrary to the transformation imperative, blithely ignored these racist utterances and actually appointed lawyers with hideous ideological baggage to represent government in court cases.
Such legal appointments are normally shrouded in secrecy and accomplished in a non-transparent manner to the exclusion of the many patriotic legal practitioners. Inevitably, the state has lost (and will continue to loose) critical legal cases through reliance on unpatriotic legal representatives due to their innate lack of commitment and ideological predisposition against the Republic of South Africa.
A case in point is the recent appointment of Advocate Martin Brassey, SC to represent SARS in the matter regarding the suspension of Deputy-Commissioner Ivan Pillay (SARS v Pillay) which the state subsequently lost.
This is the same Adv. Brassey who recently denounced the Constitutional Court affirmative action ruling in the Barnard case (South African Police Service v Solidarity obo Barnard [2014] ZACC 23), stating that "using hard quotas to achieve transformation without regard for individual human dignity, amounted to social engineering". Brassey further stated: "As white people, we get overborne by guilt, as black people we get overborne by rage."
In defiance of the Constitutional Court, Adv. Brassey urged Solidariteit/ Afriforum to take further legal action and to refer the matter to the United Nations, claiming it would be a "supreme irony", given the country's history, for South Africa to be referred to the UN for promoting race discrimination.
This is a clear case of the government lining up the pockets of racist practitioners with lucrative retainers to the exclusion of struggling progressive lawyers. Despite repeatedly showing contempt for the very same government and our legal system, some inept officials in government continue to undermine the honour and integrity of the state by showering these unpatriotic rightwing Solidariteit/ Afriforum aligned legal practitioners with lucrative legal work.
These actions undermine government's repeated declarations regarding commitment to transformation of the legal profession and the judicial system.
The Network will seek an urgent meeting with Minister of Justice Hon. Michael Masutha to address these matters which seek to cause severe damage to the transformation of the legal profession. We shall also raise as a matter of urgency the skewed briefing patterns and pernicious practices in the legal profession in which the large predominantly white law firms fail and refuse to hire black junior legal practitioners.
Statement issued by Mr Lucky Thekisho Chairperson of the HETN Board, January 13 2015
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