Judge Mogoeng's response to the open letter from IFAISA
Dear Justice Mogoeng,Please find attached a letter for you from Ifaisa. In view of the fact that we are critical of the President and the JSC in the letter, we have decided to copy it to the presidency and the Chair of the JSC.
Kindly acknowledge receipt.
Yours truly,
Paul Hoffman SC
Director
Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa
www.ifaisa.org
Dear Adv Paul Hoffman SC,
I acknowledge receipt of your latter dated 7 September 2011.
The JSC has interviewed me and that in my view is sufficient. Please do not expect any response to your letter from me.
With kind regards,
Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng
Dear Justice Mogoeng,
Re: Process, Perceptions and Prayer.
Thank you for your email below of 11.39 and for attending so swiftly to our correspondence of 10.17 this morning. We have noted in the press this morning (Cape Times page 1 column 1) that the spokesman for the President has indicated that the President might need "further clarity" in the matter of your appointment as Chief Justice. We draw comfort from this report because our letter to you is aimed at finding clarity on the issues it traverses.
In these circumstances, we must urge you to reconsider your summary rejection of our invitation to you to deal with the concerns raised by us in our letter. We do so because we respectfully consider that there is a broad spectrum of organisations ranging from COSATU to legal, gender and gay rights activist groups which have genuine reservations based upon the incomplete information at present in the public domain. You are the person best placed to address their concerns in order to promote the public confidence in the judiciary for which the recently retired Chief Justice, Sandile Ngcobo, worked so hard. If these concerns are left to fester unaddressed, when the opportunity to address them has been presented to you by us, deleterious consequences may follow and that confidence, so necessary for the smooth functioning of courts and the upholding of the rule of law may be lost.
Litigants are also left in the dark as regards the interaction between you and the President. It is reasonably foreseeable that this could in the future lead to applications for your recusal because of the incompleteness and lack of clarity of the information at present on record as a product of the inadequacy of the JSC interview process.
In the circumstances we are not going to lift the embargo which we have placed on the publication of our letter to you, so as to afford you the opportunity of praying and sleeping on the possibility of replying to us rather more fully than you have done in your email under reply. You will of course appreciate that your failure to deal with even one of our questions will reinforce the negative perceptions about you that are already in the public domain. These perceptions may or may not be accurate. You have the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings and wrong impressions which could have arisen as a consequence of the unsatisfactory nature of the questioning and the improper overall process to which you have so unfairly been subjected.
We urge you to seize this opportunity in the interests of the high esteem in which the office to which you aspire is held, in the interests of the excellent reputation of the court on which you serve and in your own personal interests. Above all, it is, we respectfully submit, in the interests of the country, its impartial and independent judiciary and its people that you accountably and responsively reply to the minutiae of our letter of 7 September 2011 and deal with the suggestions made in it. For the same reasons as before, we are copying the Presidency and the Chair of the JSC on this email.
Yours truly,
Paul Hoffman SC
Director
Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa
www.ifaisa.org
