Johannesburg - A summit should be held to discuss the country’s judiciary in the light of recent court judgments involving the executive, SA Communist Party secretary Blade Nzimande told delegates at the party’s special national congress on Wednesday.
“We are not attacking the judiciary, but are saying there has been a deliberate overreach by the judiciary. It can’t be the mandate of the judiciary to rule on matters of the executive…it is against the spirit of the separation of powers,” said Nzimande.
“As the SACP we are going convene a summit on the judiciary and the issue of separation of powers.. because we want to open a debate and not attack… we’ve been told we are attacking the judiciary whenever we raise this issue,” he said.
Nzimande added that the SACP was not friends with Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, but agreed with government’s decision to not arrest him when he was in South Africa for the 25th African Union summit in Johannesburg in June.
“We are not friends with Bashir, he has committed serious atrocities…but South Africa is not a colony. This issue was a direct attack on our national sovereignty,” he explained. “Government was correct to not arrest Bashir.”
Bashir has been indicted by the ICC for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against some of the tribes of Sudan’s western Darfur region. Two warrants of arrest were issued against him in 2009 and 2010.
As a member of the ICC, South Africa is obliged to arrest him and surrender him to the ICC – a mandate which was flouted.
The initial application before the High Court in Pretoria was brought by an NGO, the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, who had sought to compel the South African government to fulfill its obligations to the ICC by arresting Bashir.
The court requested the National Director of Public Prosecutions to consider initiating criminal charges over Bashir’s departure from South Africa, despite an order it had issued expressly prohibiting him from leaving the country.
Government announced it would appeal the court’s ruling over Bashir’s controversial departure.
ANA