Prosecutors steered away from complex cases for fear it would impact on their success rate‚ deputy justice and constitutional development minister John Jeffery said on Tuesday.
He was speaking at a workshop titled Global Action to Prevent and Address Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants in Durban.
This programme forms part of a joint response to trafficking in persons and the smuggling of migrants and is expected to be delivered in countries in Africa‚ Europe‚ Asia and Latin America.
The workshop‚ he said‚ was part of a drive to train officials in various arms of state to deal with the issue of human trafficking‚ particularly the smuggling of children.
Responding to a comment from a local prosecutor who referred to the complex nature of human trafficking and the difficulties encountered when prosecuting offenders‚ Jeffrey said that performance targets had had unforeseen consequences.
“One of the problems and an unforeseen consequence of targets in the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] for the number of successful convictions is that prosecutors don’t want to take on the complex cases for fear of losing them‚” he said.
“We need to measure performance‚ but we cannot have a situation where more complex cases are dropped because it is dubious to whether they will succeed in favour of more simple cases‚” Jeffery said.
He said that the trend had been discovered when lawmakers were busy crafting the Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act.
“When we were busy with the bill we wanted statistics from the NPA as to the successful prosecutions [of trafficking cases] and we were given a list and we were quite shocked that at that stage people were being found guilty but they weren’t going to prison…they were being handed massive suspended sentences. We couldn’t work out what was going on but then the NPA told us that this was because of plea bargains. I think the NPA was not confident at that stage to take matters to trial‚” he said.
“Luckily that has changed. It would seem from the outside that the NPA found its backbone in the trafficking matters and started fighting them‚” Jeffery added.
KZN Director of Public Prosecutions Moipone Noko said that prosecutors were not solely guided by conviction statistics.
“It is true that we have targets but we are not driven by them. Prosecutors in this province will tell you that I remind them we are here to do justice. We use our targets as a measure of performance. If a matter needs to be dealt with‚ we do it‚” she said.
“I have dedicated prosecutors in specialised units and that have the skills and the expertise to do the job‚” Noko added.
- TimesLIVE
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