The Constitutional Court is located in one of the most fascinating groups of buildings in the world.
This great photograph of the open doors of the court building was taken by Paul Jacobson. (Available under a Creative Commons Non Commercial Share Alike Licence 2.0 Generic).
The design of the building uses light and space to emphasize the openness of the Court to the citizens of South Africa.
The new buildings, designed by the winners of an international design competition, the brief emphasized that the buildings should symbolise the role of the Constitution in an open and transparent society.They also transform an apartheid prison into a locus of open justice.
It was an appropriate setting for a two day workshop on the intersection of privacy and the open justice hosted by the Southern African Legal Information Institute
held on the 27th and 28th of September 2007.
Appropriate because the raison d’etre of SAFLII is to further the openness of courts through Southern Africa, by making judicial opinions available freely online.
While courts in open society’s have been open in a formal sense for centuries in practical terms unless one could travel to a court to sit in a hearing, or to examine the record, one had no free access to the decisions of courts. There was paid access to some of the decisions of some of the courts, bundled together in extensive, costly collections of deadwood (and dead cow) law reports.
Only the rich, powerful or lucky had lawyers who owned and could navigate those repositories of legal decisions.
SAFLII has changed that, so that Africans can finally see the decisions of their own courts quickly, efficiently, and easily. The free on-line availability of court decisions is a major component of open justice, it enables multitudes more to have access to the law, it enables public scrutiny of the operation of courts, thus enhancing the legitimacy of courts. Southern African courts have generally proven extremely willing to make case reports available via SAFLII, a willingness which demonstrates their commitment to the principle of open justice.
