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Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane has been denied permission to appeal the ruling that rejected her attempt to intercept the parliament’s impeachment process against her.
The Western Cape Superior Court on Monday dismissed his request for permission to appeal.
On behalf of a unanimous bench of three judges, Judge Vincent Saldanha said that Mkhwebane had accepted that he had a high threshold to meet in order to succeed in his permit application and had not established any of the grounds required by law to grant permission to appeal.
In October, the high court refused to grant him an urgent provisional injunction to prevent parliament from taking further steps in a process, still in its early stages, that could eventually lead to his impeachment. She had sought this as an interim step pending her judicial challenge to the constitutionality of the recently adopted rules for impeachment of the heads of Chapter Nine institutions, which has yet to be heard.
Saldanha said that one of Mkhwebane’s grounds for appeal was that the judges should have dealt with each and every argument she had presented in court at her trial. However, to grant the provisional injunction you requested, you would have had to satisfy all the requirements of an urgent provisional injunction. But “we are of the opinion that the applicant had not established any of the requirements for provisional measures,” it said.
Nor was the court convinced of having incorrectly applied the test for the granting of provisional injunctions. Regarding the rest of Mkhwebane’s “37 challenges to the judgment,” the court found it unnecessary to address each one, “since the main judgment comprehensively addressed the relief requested by the applicant.”
In its October ruling, the full court had said that the impeachment provisions in section 194 of the constitution were “a serious mechanism” for the accountability of officials of Chapter Nine constitutional institutions. For a court to interfere in that process, the applicant must demonstrate “exceptional circumstances”. Mkhwebane hadn’t.
The court also said in the main ruling that despite Mkhwebane’s scathing criticism of Speaker of Parliament Thandi Modise and the district attorney, who made the motion to impeach Mkhwebane, it said it was not convinced Modise had acted. “somehow” faith.
“I’m not convinced either [that] the applicant’s bad fides complaints against the tenth defendant (the DA) are … sustainable, ”said Saldanha.
Mkhwebane can still apply to the Supreme Court of Appeals for authorization to appeal.
TimesLIVE
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