PAIA LITIGATION AGAINST LEGAL AID SOUTH AFRICA & THE JUDICIAL SERVICE COMMISSION

HIGH COURT PAIA APPLICATION AGAINST THE JSC

The application was issued and served in April 2022. It's been answered (substantially conceded), and a reply is in preparation.

THREE HIGH COURT PAIA APPLICATIONS AGAINST LASA

The first case was argued on 30 August 2019. Making the most obvious basic reversible errors of fact and law, Judge Portia Poyo Dlwati dismissed the application, but granted an application for leave to appeal. Repeating her core mistakes, she then dismissed an application for exemption from putting up security for LASA's costs of the appeal, and that decision is currently under appeal.

The second case will be set down after the botched judgment delivered in the first has been corrected on appeal, if Chief Legal Executive Patrick Hundermark doesn't then concede it, seeing as in opposition to all three High Court PAIA applications against LASA he raised exactly the same useless defenses that he'd just abandoned in previous PAIA litigation in the Magistrate's Court (see below).

The third case ditto.

These three High Court cases were preceded by five PAIA applications to the Eshowe Magistrates Court, which LASA conceded in the courtroom moments before argument. The court papers and the further history of LASA's persistent illegal suppression of duly requested records, and its repeated dishonestly false reporting to the SAHRC to conceal this from Parliament, are accessible here.

The early failures of the SAHRC's useless PAIA Unit and of the useless Public Protector to intervene and require LASA's compliance with PAIA are documented here and here (username: lasa    password: LASA2010). Note that these two linked webpages aren't perfectly complete; further futile high-level communications followed; see ignored complaint and covering correspondence here.

An appeal to the equally useless Information Regulator to intervene in LASA's ongoing refusal to comply with PAIA was simply returned in its original envelope without acknowledgement.

Which all goes to show: the three organs of state statutorily charged with monitoring and enforcing compliance with PAIA by other organs of state in accordance with their information transparency obligations imposed by section 32(1)(a) of the Constitution have proved completely ineffectual.

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