Chief Justice

Mar
19
2021

Supreme Court judge's sensational claims against Chief Justice

By Carmel Rickard

What was meant to be the end of a high-profile political case intended to challenge the outcome of Uganda’s national elections earlier this year turned into something even more astonishing late this week: a senior member of the country’s Supreme Court claimed that Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo had tried to gag her and stop her reading her minority decision in the matter until he had vetted her ruling.

This week saw an unparalleled drama play out in Uganda’s supreme court. Now, lawyers and members of the public are waiting for clarification by the country’s new Chief Justice, Alfonse Owiny-Dollo, the jurist who followed former Chief Justice Bart Katureebe, after having been appointed seven months ago.  

Mar
05
2021

Judicial disciplinary body tells Chief Justice to retract, apologise for pro-Israel comments critical of government policy

By Carmel Rickard

South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has been told to issue an apology and a retraction for a series of highly controversial comments he made in the middle of last year, criticising Pretoria’s policy on Israel. The decision plus the ‘remedial steps’ of apology and retraction were issued this week by the Judicial Conduct Committee of SA’s Judicial Service Commission. After a mid-2020 interview and subsequent comments defending the views he expressed, several official complaints were made to the JSC.

Read decision

The controversy began when South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng took part in a webinar with SA’s chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein. The event, in June 2020, was hosted by the Jerusalem Post and was headlined: Two Chiefs, One Mission – confronting apartheid of the heart’.

Dec
03
2020

‘Unprecedented levels of political interference with courts’ – Chief Justice

By Carmel Rickard
The leader of the judiciary in England and Wales has reacted sharply to continuing attempts by politicians to interfere with the judiciary, judicial appointments and judicial decisions. In fact, he has even suggested that politicians should be taught about the boundaries that should exist between parliament and the judiciary and that a short course could be drawn up for new members, to explain these ‘boundaries’ and why they should be observed.
 

When you read a headline like the one above it is easy to imagine that the Chief Justice expressing these concerns is from some obscure country with no understanding of judicial independence, no history of separation of powers. But in fact the Chief Justice who made these observations was the Lord Burnett of Maldon, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, head of the judiciary of England and Wales and President of the Courts of England and Wales.

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