Who is dikgang moseneke

Moseneke : Indeed, it is quite a privilege. We looked quite closely at the U. It has been one of the oldest and the most venerable constitutions, but it is certainly not a modern constitution and it says very little in relation to what we intended to say. Modern constitutions tend to be explicit about what you seek to provide for. So, instead, we looked a lot to newer constitutions in Europe, in Latin America, and in Canada. Modern constitutions also tend to be in accessible language.

We wanted people to be able to pick up our constitution and read it. We also made a number of decisions that were quite difficult at the time of drafting. The courts, for instance. Will we have a Supreme Court? Yes, we will. Will it have judicial review powers? Yes, it will. What size of court will we have as a Supreme Court? Seven, nine, eleven? The German Supreme Court has 16 justices sitting in two panels of eight. Canada had seven at the time. Other countries in Europe had nine.

And others had eleven. We chose eleven. We went backwards and forwards on the question of whether the justices would have tenure for life. We had the benefit of hindsight and were able to look at what the U. We decided that we will have a fixed term, maximum of which will be 15 years.

So I had to fall on my own sword and retire recently. My 15 years ran out very quickly. All of us had to come off the bench despite feeling energized and fiery and at the height of our intellectual ability. But we opted for renewal, and we recognize that judicial power is a vast power. We also restricted the presidential term to two terms, like the United States. We copied the two terms from you but made it two terms of five years instead of four. There was quite an anxiety to limit terms in order to not confer security of tenure and invite abuse.

So he was all the time trying to set good examples for all of us. He could have asked for a lifetime term and, frankly, he would have got it. But he stuck with one term and stepped down.

Moseneke : After writing the constitution, I was invited by Nelson Mandela to be the deputy chairperson of the electoral commission, the commission that ran our first democratic elections.

It was a huge task and a huge privilege. Of course, the elections meant so much. Think about it. In almost years, it was the first time that we had a common voters roll. It was the first time South Africa had a bill of rights. It was the first time that we introduced a whole range of mechanisms that we can talk about in a law class anytime. We introduced a whole range of tools and we spent the time to carefully write up the constitution in order to make sure that everyone can pick it up and just read it out.

The legitimacy of the elections was quite, quite critical. Up to then, only three million white South Africans were entitled to vote. We were a country of about 40 million, with 22 million adult Africans. Under the new constitution, they were entitled to vote. So suddenly we had to roll out voting machinery to accommodate all 22 million new people. It was quite an operation. We had to get, for instance, ballot papers printed outside of South Africa.

I think we went to the United Kingdom and Canada. In any event, there we were, all set to run the elections. They were not perfect. We had some procedural issues as we went along with the elections. But substantively, the elections were free and fair without a doubt.

Nelson Mandela emerged as president. In a sense, I was his vehicle, or part of his vehicle, for becoming president, as well as a vehicle for our people in establishing a democratic country. I grieved for 10 years on Robben Island. Our end goal — to banish colonialism and to introduce a more just society — required that we be different from the perpetrators of apartheid, rather than reenact our unequal past.

Spending all our time being our own liberators and then immediately seeking to do what apartheid did would have been bankrupt in many, many ways. I want to add a quick note about F. He bit the bullet. He announced that he was going to release Nelson Mandela, which was a huge chance and a huge risk.

He was going to lift the ban on all the political organizations and was going to implore these organizations to enter into negotiations with him. Everything was coming to an end shortly after the Berlin Wall had come down and the Cold War was tottering, so he wanted to take full advantage of that.

He has had a few missteps, and he talks out of turn. The other day, he said he thought apartheid was not that bad after all. That invited a lot of wrath from many, many people. We have established institutions of state, notably, the judiciary where I worked for 15 years. The jurisprudence is available for all to read and see. The biggest trouble is not the democracy. The biggest trouble is eliminating poverty.

There is an inevitable intersection between class and race and sometimes gender. We still struggle with the full extent of social justice, equality, and the historical axis of apartheid. The impact of this still haunts our system. South Africans chose to look into the mirror. We chose to confront the inhumanity of our system.

We created panels of judges to hear the evidence and to decide whether the admissions were full and frank. If it was, you were entitled to amnesty. If someone thought the perpetrator had unfairly received amnesty, you could go right up to our court to review the decision. There were submissions about capital punishment under the apartheid system, which executed people compulsively as a habit.

In Justice Moseneke served on the technical committee that drafted the Interim Constitution of In he was appointed Deputy Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, which conducted the first democratic elections in South Africa. Between and Justice Moseneke pursued a full-time corporate career in various capacities.

Justice Moseneke is the first chancellor of Pretoria Technikon and currently serves as chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand. In the past 20 years, Justice Moseneke has read numerous papers at law and business conferences, published several academic papers in law journals at home and abroad.

Justice Moseneke holds several honorary doctorates and is a recipient of numerous awards of honour, performance and excellence and will be obtaining an Honorary LLD Doctorate in Law degree at Nelson Mandela University on 14 December Search for:.

In he was admitted and practised for five years as an attorney and partner at the law firm Maluleke, Seriti and Moseneke. In he was called to the Bar and practised as an advocate in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Ten years later, in , he was elevated to the status of senior counsel. He served on the technical committee that drafted the Interim Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of In he was appointed Deputy Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, which conducted the first democratic elections in South Africa.

In September , while practising law, he accepted an acting appointment to the Transvaal Provincial Division of the Supreme Court. On 29 November , he was appointed as judge in the Constitutional Court and in June , he was appointed Deputy Chief Justice of the Republic of South Africa — a position he held until his retirement in May