Constitutional law experts have described a private interaction between chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan which touched on matters of the judiciary as inappropriate and deserving of criticism.
This comes after Mogoeng revealed that Gordhan had asked to meet him and during that meeting Gordhan asked about how his friend and judge Dhaya Pillay had fared during the interviews for a judicial post.
EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu has since laid a case of corruption against Gordhan at the Hillbrow police station, accusing him of attempting to influence Mogoeng to appoint his "personal friend".
Constitutional law expert Prof Pierre de Vos said the meeting created a worrying perception of the executive interfering in the judiciary.
"If someone in the executive or any influential politician deliberately goes out to meet somebody like the chief justice and discusses anything relating to the judiciary... that is inappropriate," De Vos said.
Gordhan said in a statement released yesterday that mentioning Pillay was "purely incidental" as the April 2016 meeting had nothing to do with trying to influence her appointment in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
De Vos, however, said he still "felt uncomfortable for a chief justice to meet someone in the executive in private".
De Vos said Gordhan and Mogoeng could have opted to exchange documents in relation to how the Nkandla judgment would be implemented, which Gordhan said was among the reasons for their meeting. "It's important for the executive and the judiciary to keep an arm's length from one another," he said.
De Vos said although the intention may not have been to influence anything, such a private meeting still created a wrong perception.
Law expert Dr Llewelyn Curlewis from the University of Pretoria said even though he doesn't see any impropriety with Gordhan's actions this still does raise eyebrows.
"Obviously you are opening yourself up for scrutiny and criticism afterwards, that's always on the table, but in itself there's nothing wrong per se on condition that the independence and objectivity still holds throughout," Curlewis said.
Gordhan said he has written to the secretary of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to provide clarity on the remarks made by Mogoeng about their meeting.
"I want to state emphatically that I would never and nor did I in any way, seek to influence the chief justice or the JSC in the appointment of judges, whose independence I have always respected," Gordhan said.
He said that in any event, by the time he met Mogoeng, it was public knowledge that Pillay did not make it.
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