The Judicial Service Commission on Tuesday evening recommended Supreme Court of Appeal justice Zeenat Carelse for judge president of the Land Court, a court she said dealt with “one of the most serious issues this country faces”.
“We’ve got to get it right,” Carelse said in her JSC interview.
The Land Court is the new name for the Land Claims Court, which has, through legislation, become a permanent court and will soon have an expanded jurisdiction.
Currently the court deals with disputes that arise over land restitution claims, security of tenure claims and labour tenancy disputes and awards under three pieces of legislation. Soon it will also adjudicate disputes under four more crucial land laws including the Provision of State Land Act, which provides for state funding for the development of land.
Land restitution and claims have been beset with backlogs that have mostly been attributed to the department of rural development and the Land Claims Commission, which process these claims.
They only go to court when there is a dispute. But there have also been challenges to the finalisation of disputes by rural litigants, and the court has been hampered by its lack of permanent status and judicial resources.
The new Land Court Act made the court a permanent court and made its judges, who were all seconded from the high court, permanent judges of the land court.
Carelse said the expanded jurisdiction of the court gave “certainty” to litigants. With land issues “now concentrated in place, people will not be confused”, she said.
The court also now has an appellate function, so that litigants “won’t have to wait in the queue” for the Supreme Court of Appeal, she said.
Carelse has been a judge for 16 years and was, for a period, acting deputy judge president of the Gauteng high court, one of South Africa’s busiest courts, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a stint she described as one of the highlights of her career.
I am very invested in that court ... I’m here to serve.
— Justice Zeenat Carelse
She told the JSC that during this period she had to manage about 60 judges and allocate cases to them and implement the caselines system — for the electronic filing and management of court papers.
She said even though it was height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it did not take long before the court was running like “on a normal day”.
Asked by deputy chief justice Mandisa Maya about her vision for the Land Court, a court known to be “beset with challenges”, Carelse said she had already been to the court and spoken to its staff and judges and obtained a list of its reserved judgments and outstanding matters.
Carelse acted as a judge of the Land Claims Court from 2009 to 2021. She said the most important thing with a court like the Land Court was to ensure access. Litigants came from all parts of the country, she said, so she hoped to implement the electronic court system. While resource constraints were always an issue, this could not be an excuse.
Carelse said she did not see it as a demotion to go from the Supreme Court of Appeal to the be judge president of the Land Claims Court. “I am very invested in that court ... I’m here to serve,” she said.
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