Appearing in parliament, two of the country's most senior judges - Judge President of the Gauteng division of the High Court Bernard Ngoepe and Supreme Court of Appeal judge Robert Nugent - said more than 200 sitting and retired judges were against draft regulations aimed at compelling them to disclose their assets and business interests and those of their children and spouses.

The draft regulations have been proposed by Radebe as part of his judicial reforms and are being considered by parliament.

JB Skhosana, a senior official in the Department of Justice, said that, as matters stood, judges were under no obligation to declare their business interests because the law providing for this was passed only in 2010.

It was only now that parliament was moving towards enacting it by crafting the required regulatory framework.

"The law [that] requires declaration was only passed in 2010 and the law requires regulations to be passed, and this is the process," he said.

The draft regulations come at a time when the ANC government appears to have lost patience with the judiciary.

Over the past few months, both President Jacob Zuma and the ruling party's secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, have made negative comments about the role and place of the judiciary in society.

Zuma has recently had his decisions overturned by the courts. In November, his appointment of Menzi Simelane as national director of public prosecutions was declared invalid by the Supreme Court of Appeal.

In November, Zuma said: "Our view is that the executive, as elected officials, has the sole discretion to decide policies for [the] government.

''The executive must be allowed to conduct its administration and policy-making work as freely as it possibly can.''

In August, Mantashe said: "One of the things that is dangerous, the independence of judiciary and separation of powers, must never be translated into hostility, where one of those arms becomes hostile to the other.

"Unless this issue was addressed, it was going to cause instability. It undermined the other arms of government."

Yesterday, the judges argued that there was no evidence to support the introduction of the strict regulatory regime as there had only been one sitting judge found to have carried out questionable financial practices.

This appeared to be an indirect reference to the matter involving Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe, who was found by the Judicial Service Commission to have moonlighted for Oasis Asset Management - receiving a R10000-a-month retainer - when he gave the company permission to sue fellow Judge Siraj Desai. Hlophe was reprimanded.

Nugent said any attempt to force judges to disclose the financial and business interests of their families was an "irrational intrusion" of privacy.

"There is simply no basis on which these regulations, as far as they apply to the family, will have any effect at all other than to be a major invasion of privacy," said Nugent.

He told MPs they would challenge the draft regulations in the Constitutional Court if they were adopted in their current form.

"They are irrational; they serve no legitimate purpose and they go far beyond any legitimate purpose one might speculate on," said Nugent.

He said judges would only support a framework wherein declarations of interests were made by sitting judges, with the Chief Justice as the keeper of the register.

Nugent said they would propose that public access to a register be strictly limited to those who could show reasonable grounds for asking the Chief Justice for it.

"If you feel that there should be disclosure by sitting judges, we are amenable to that, but respect the privacy of that judge," he said.

However, ANC MP and ad hoc committee chairman Amos Matila accused the judges of rejecting the proposed regulations because some within the judiciary could not explain their wealth.

"A lot of judges, with the small salary that they earn, as they retire they own huge farms, they own a lot of things, you don't know where they got these things from. They can't account," Matila said.

Another ANC MP, John Jeffery, said that though the judges were raising valid points, the regulations were merely aimed at ensuring a "judiciary that is beyond reproach".

But Judge Ngoepe weighed in, saying that instructing acting judges to declare their financial interests would have a dire effect on the administration of justice.

He said high courts were heavily reliant on the support of practising senior counsel, who were occasionally required to act as judges. He said the proposed regulations could be prejudicial to their private firms, which in turn could discourage them from serving the state.

"We will not be able to have people appointed as acting judges if these regulations stand as they are, we are going to hamper the administration of justice," he said.

"We don't appoint acting judges as a favour to them; they get appointed as a favour to us; we need them, they don't need us.

"I need them to run those courts. As it has happened in many instances, some of them just decline.

"Now when you are going to require them to make a disclosure of this nature, how many are you going to get?"