Date:09/09/2010
Source: The Democratic Alliance
Title: DA: Smuts: Address by DA Member of Parliament, on justice and constitutional development, National Assembly, Cape Town

The DA asks the National Assembly to nominate Dr Gladstone Sandi Baai as a Human Rights Commissioner.

Dr. Baai is a PhD philosophy (Durham) who played a leading role in establishing ethics guidelines in the public service for more than a decade after the adoption of the final constitution. He served as Director of Professional Ethics at the Office of the Public Service Commission, the Chapter 10 institution. We would like to send him now to a Chapter Nine, the SAHRC, where in our view his skills in developing the monitoring of the Code which he himself developed,and in research makes him a good choice for functions such as the SAHRC's special constitutional duty of holding government departments to account for the implementation of the socio-economic rights.

Among the many books he authored and co-authored is a title called "Snatching Bread from the Mouth of the Poor: Ethics and Corruption" which I rather think says it all.

May I say that Dr. Baai struck me as a person of substance. Human Rights Commissioners must be such persons. Their entire impact and effect on society rests on the moral authority they bring to bear, because they can make no binding orders. They are not a court of law. They command and exercise moral suasion - as the previous Commission under Jody Kollapen, Leon Wessels, Karthy Govender and a few others so successfully did - or they command nothing at all.

We need Dr. Baai. It is notable that a person specialising in ethics takes the place of a person you were asked to appoint last year, until Cope drew to our attention, rather late in the day and moreover erroneously as to exact fact, that Adv. Mpulwana had been discharged from the employ of the TRC.

Thanks to the intercession of a concerned citizen in the Eastern Cape, the true facts and the actual High Court judgement in the matters between the TRC and Adv. Mpulwana and Adv. Mpulwana and the TRC were provided to me, and therefore to the Justice Committee.

We gave the appropriate opportunity for a hearing. We are bound, as is this House, by the unchallenged judgement of the High Court that that the Advocate "by his non-disclosure of his employment in the Eastern Cape Provincial Administration fraudulently misrepresented to the TRC that he was a fit and proper person to be employed by it whereas that was not the case". Some of us feel that we, too, were subjected to non-disclosure and misrepresentation.

May I use this opportunity to urge party spokespersons to present shortlists for appointment to their caucuses before the final decision needs ratification. This is not the first time, in respect of a Chapter Nine, that inappropriate persons have been selected when party caucus members could have averted such choices simply because some of their members had experience or insight into candidates. I imagine in this case that the Hom Thozamile Botha may have had something to do with the Hon Adams's warning, which came only when we were asking the House to vote on a finally negotiated agreed list. At least Cope has helped, here; in other cases it was too late and the consequences which duly unfolded were unfortunately predictable.