President Cyril Ramaphosa says a public hearing into his conduct would be humiliating.
This is contained in papers he filed at the Western Cape High Court in his urgent bid to halt Parliament’s Section 89 impeachment proceedings.
The matter is being heard in court on Wednesday.
Ramaphosa wants the Parliamentary process suspended, pending the review of the Section 89 Independent Panel report, that found he has a prima facie case to answer over the Phala Phala matter.
In May, the Constitutional Court ruled that the National Assembly acted irrationally when it voted against the implementation of the report and that impeachment proceedings should be instituted against the President.
Ramaphosa’s legal representative Wim Trengrove says: “He is not saying, I don’t want to give my account publicly. What he is saying is that the Constitutional Court has held in the EFF case that such an inquiry is a punitive process. He says it is punitive because it is humiliating to a President to be prosecuted for misconduct in a public hearing. And that is what he seeks to say.”
Misconduct without evidence
Ramaphosa’s legal team is arguing that misconduct without evidence of acting in bad faith does not automatically equate to impeachment.
Trengrove told the court that the panel never considered whether there was ever bad faith on the side of Ramaphosa.
“It’s not impeachable if not in bad faith or intentional. It means the behaviour of President the must be intentional. For misconduct to reach a level of impeachment, there must be evidence the president intentionally transgressed the law.”
Trengrove says the Section 89 Independent Panel report failed its test to find sufficient evidence and that it only relied on prima facie evidence.
He argues that the Impeachment Committee should be halted because the Section 89 Independent Panel did not make a strong case that it had sufficient evidence.
“We think that the purpose of interposing the panel in the scheme of the impeachment process was intended to ensure that the President is not required to undergo full-scale Section 89 Impeachment Inquiry in circumstances where the President has no case to answer. That step must never be taken lightly. It is a momentous act justified only when sufficient evidence exists to show that the president has a case to answer. Now, we will submit to you that the panel got the test wrong. The prima facie evidence vs sufficient evidence.”
‘Courts should not interfere with Parliament’
Meanwhile, legal representative for the African Transformation Party (ATM) Advocate Anton Katz has argued that courts should not get involved in the processes of other arms of state.
Katz says Ramaphosa’s attempts to stall the Impeachment Committee come down to interference in the work of Parliament.
“Courts should not interfere in processes. What is going on today is a process disturbance. There is no review before court today, it’s the disturbance of a process. It is not for court to prescribe to Parliament what structures to establish.”
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