A long-delayed judicial conduct tribunal into potentially impeachable alleged misconduct by Western Cape judge Mushtak Parker is set to begin on Monday — investigating whether Parker gave “contradictory and mutually exclusive versions” on an alleged assault by the province's former judge president John Hlophe.
The claimed assault was at the centre of a bitter row between Hlophe and his then-deputy, Patricia Goliath, in 2020 when she laid a wide-ranging complaint against Hlophe to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). But when Hlophe — still judge president at the time — responded, he denied the assault and said Parker would deny it too.
This provoked its own storm because, according to several other judges of the division, Parker had told them in no uncertain terms that Hlophe had assaulted him. They laid their own complaint against Parker.
Parker, who was appointed as a judge in 2017, has now been offwork, on suspension but on full pay for longer than he was at work performing judicial duties.
The tribunal, established in January 2021, was delayed for years due to his ill-health. But in November last year, its chair, retired Gauteng judge president Bernard Ngoepe, was emphatic there should be no further delays as it had been “dragging for quite some time”.
The complainant judges are Dennis Davis, Siraj Desai, Shehnaz Meer, Lee Bozalek, Ashley Binns-Ward, Elize Steyn, Patrick Gamble, Robert Henney, Owen Rogers, and Mark Sher. The tribunal could see some or all of them called to testify against their colleague.
He said he was in a very violent manner pushed by judge president Hlophe against a door, which resulted in him having sustained an injury against his back
— Judge Robert Henney, in a statement to the JCC
Parker’s colleagues told the Judicial Conduct Committee (JCC) that Parker had told them Hlophe had accused him of “want[ing] to screw my wife” and then assaulted him. Hlophe's wife at the time was another judge of the division, Gayaat Salie-Hlophe.
“He said he was in a very violent manner pushed by judge president Hlophe against a door, which resulted in him having sustained an injury against his back,” said Henney in an affidavit to the JCC.
Judge Derek Wille told the JCC Parker had come to him after the incident and asked him to take an affidavit down in which Parker had recorded the incident.
But then, after Goliath referred to the incident in her complaint to the JSC against Hlophe, Hlophe denied the assault.
Hlophe said he had shown the portion of his affidavit containing the denial to Parker “and he agrees with this version”. Parker also wrote to judge Andre le Grange saying “very soon [after the alleged assault] ... I realised that events may not have unfolded in the way that I had initially perceived. This is quite understandable, given my emotional state at the time”.
The tribunal is also investigating a second complaint, by the Cape Bar Council, about allegations related to Parker’s law firm, Parker and Khan, just before his appointment as a judge.
In January 2020, the Cape Town office of the Legal Practice Council (LPC) obtained an interdict to stop Parker’s former partners from practising as attorneys, pending an application to strike them off the attorneys’ roll because they had misappropriated clients’ trust funds.
In its complaint, the Cape Bar Council said Parker was aware of what was happening at his firm and that there was a large deficit in the firm’s trust account, but did not disclose this to the JSC when he was interviewed to be a judge.
The Cape Bar Council also said Parker was obliged to report the large deficit in the firm’s trust account to the Cape Law Society but he did not — in breach of the rules of the society.
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