The Judicial Service Commission (JSC) on Tuesday recommended the appointment of Eastern Cape High Court judge Glenn Goosen and Gauteng High Court judges Piet Meyer, Keoagile Matojane, Sharise Weiner and Daisy Molefe as justices of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA). 

The five were selected from 11 candidates interviewed on Monday and Tuesday, and after the commission was locked behind closed doors in deliberations for more than an hour.

Meyer is a highly experienced judge, the most senior in the Gauteng division after the judge president and deputy judges president. He has acted at the SCA since 2013, and for a combined period of two and a half years, he said in his JSC questionnaire.

During his interview, he said he had been acting at the SCA before most permanent justices were appointed.  

“Apart from acting president [Xola] Petse and justice [Visvanathan] Ponnan, all the other judges in the SCA were appointed since I started to act in the SCA in 2013,” he said.

During Meyer's interview deputy chief justice Mandisa Maya said he was a very experienced judge and had appeared before the JSC before, but had “competed at a time when the demographics didn’t favour you”.

“Yes, and I understood it always,” said Meyer.

Matojane is also an experienced and respected judge, appointed in 2009, and something of a household name as one of the Pretoria judges who has often presided over cases in the news.

Most recently, he declared unlawful the decision to grant medical parole to former president Jacob Zuma, a decision taken on appeal to the SCA and in which judgment is pending.

The judgment was obliquely referred to in his interview on Tuesday when commissioner and EFF leader Julius Malema asked how, when correctional services was meant to be about rehabilitation, it could be in line with that objective to incarcerate “a frail, sick old man” who is 90 years old.

Matojane said the “short answer” was Malema wanted “to get me into trouble by asking me about hypothetical facts”.

“I don’t go out and look for cases. Parties come before me and my job is to adjudicate,” he said.

He said he knew where Malema was going and “that matter is pending” before the SCA, which would tell him if he was right or wrong.

Malema responded: “With due respect, I don’t know which case you are talking about. But if you are uncomfortable, it is OK.”

Weiner was appointed to the bench in 2011 and was one of the trail blazer women advocates at the Johannesburg Bar, becoming an advocate in 1978, and senior counsel for 15 years before her elevation to the bench.

Commissioner Carol Steinberg SC said during her interview on Tuesday she wanted to acknowledge Weiner’s “extraordinary contribution to women”.

“It’s sad, but not all women support women in a profession where we compete with each other,” she said.

Weiner had “truly been inspirational to generations of women”, said Steinberg.

Goosen is a highly respected judge with an activist history. In his nomination letter, former SCA president Lex Mpati said he had known Goosen since 1989 when he was a young activist in Gqeberha working with political detainees. He was also national director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s investigations unit from 1996 to 1997.

He has been a judge since 2012 and penned the famous “school furniture case”, holding that the failure by the Department of Education to provide furniture for pupils in a rural school in Transkei infringed the right to basic education.

The second woman candidate to get the nod from the JSC was Molefe who, like Weiner, came from the Gauteng division of the high court. Molefe was appointed in 2013, according to her JSC questionnaire, and started her career as an academic at the University of the North West in 1984. Molefe has acted at the Land Claims Court and Labour Appeal Court.

In her CV, Molefe sets out that she was the founding director of Molefe-Dlepu Inc Attorneys in 1988. During her interview, Kathleen Matolo-Dlepu, now a Legal Practice Council member, said she and Molefe, as partners in a law firm, “thought we could change the legal profession and prove a point that, as women, we could make it”.

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