Judge John Hlophe
4 May 2021
The FW de Klerk Foundation is shocked - but not surprised - by recent comments about South Africa’s judiciary made by Western Cape High Court Judge President, John Hlophe.
According to news reports Hlophe accused the judiciary “of being soaked in politics, battling to deal with transformation, and allowing apartheid-era judges to dominate the narrative”. In a lecture to the University of South Africa’s Department of Public, Constitutional and International Law (UNISA), which he delivered last week - after he had been found guilty of gross misconduct by the Judicial Conduct Tribunal - Hlophe described South Africa’s law “as a white man’s law imposed by colonialists and an infusion of English heritage and the Roman-Dutch law, which rendered it incapable of delivering justice for the common man”.
Hlophe continued that “race is very important given our (apartheid) past. So any judiciary which is still white male-dominated can never be construed as legitimate”.