- Advocate Pierre de Waal highlighted the severe challenges facing South Africa’s court system during a Durbanville Community Police Forum meeting, likening it to driving an old, unreliable car.
- He stressed that resource shortages and systemic failures contribute to the backlog of cases, with some taking nearly five years to reach court.
- De Waal urged for greater community involvement to combat apathy and assist in addressing crime through the existing legal framework.
“The state of the courts is not good, but there’s nothing better at the moment. That’s what we have. It’s like driving an old car – you are going to have trouble, and we are having trouble,” said Adv Pierre de Waal at the meeting of Durbanville Community Police Forum (CPF) last Thursday. De Waal shed some light on the state of courts in the country. “We need to get the people around us to stop this apathy about it; that is the main problem. We need to solve problems by ourselves, obviously in a legal way, but through the system.
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“It is so that there is a failure down the line, but it all comes back to resources. I know it’s also an excuse that is being abused by some people. “You get people that do their jobs, and you get a lot of people that don’t do their jobs, and they blame resources,” he said.“But, imagine doing what these people must be doing every day. With only three police vans in Durbanville, I am glad I am not a policeman,” De Waal said.
Community involvement
“People can become involved though. I remember when I started off in the north in the department of justice, and I went to rural areas, they had very strict systems in place. The community policed the crime. Something like cattle theft was just not tolerated. It is community involvement, and we are moving back to that,” he said.“The state of the courts is not difficult to predict. I’m going to start off by saying, if I could just tell you where I come from. I used to be a prosecutor, later a magistrate.
I’ve been in private practice as an advocate for 37 years. “I have a fair idea of what’s going on in the courts via feedback from colleagues and so forth. As would typically happen in any community, your lower courts would be more busy. A greater number of cases would present there, because you have petty cases and more serious cases. Then you get the regional courts that normally would deal with more serious cases like robbery and murder.
It is a reflexion of the community as well.“We all know that the economy forces people to commit crime. Joblessness is a problem. So it’s a much bigger problem. And then the frustration that we all have, why do the courts let people go?
Joblessness
“The economy obviously feeds this whole system. Because the numbers increase all the time – we have seen the figures of joblessness in the country increase tremendously, it is reflected in the courts. I don’t know of a new court that has been built in the last 20 years. The last new high court that I’m aware of, was in Pretoria.“I deal more with civil cases, in other words, where people either get injured or they sue on a commercial basis.
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In Johannesburg, the backlog before you get to court, is four years and nine months. That’s the latest statistics. So, it just shows you that there is a problem.“For a court case to happen, you have to have a court room and a magistrate, and in a criminal court, also a prosecutor. We only have so many. We get back to the same problem that’s infected our whole society – resources.“It’s not only in South Africa, it’s all over the world. You need to have court rooms and you need to have people to man those court rooms in order to deal with more cases.
Five years
“I’m not defending the system. Far from it. I’m as frustrated as all of you are, especially in my world, to hear that a case will take almost five years before it gets to court. That is why people are let go for minor crimes when they get to court, because there’s a selection that has to be made.“I was thinking on how to explain it. You can imagine when you go to casualty at Mediclinic. If you have sprained your ankle, the person that has been shot will get treated first. The same with crime. They will pay a lot more attention to serious crime and I think it’s a logical way of dealing with it.
“That is something that one has to appreciate, even though it’s very frustrating for all of us. The reality in our country, I think, is that there is so much petty crime, and although it’s frustrating for us, we should face the reality that some things can be done and others can’t be done. You cannot let the murderer go because you want to deal with a petty crime on a particular day. “I think we must not be disheartened to put off to report crime, but I think we also need to understand everybody in the system faces the same problem.
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“Residents in a community like ours are frustrated because things are not done perhaps as they should be done by the police, but the police have their own problem with getting people to the court and getting people through the system,” he said.
