KZN Judge Faces Tribunal Over Late Judgment – 12 Years Later

KwaZulu-Natal Judge Jacqueline Henriques will face a Judicial Conduct Tribunal arising from her conduct around a judgment she failed to deliver for years.

• KwaZulu-Natal Judge Jacqueline Henriques is to face a tribunal for a late judgment dating back to 2013, when she presided in the Northern Cape High Court.
• When the complaint was laid against her in 2016, the judgment had been outstanding for three years and five months.
• In 2017, the Judicial Conduct Committee recommended that the matter be referred to a tribunal, but the Judicial Service Commission only resolved to do so in April 2025.
• This lapse of time, unexplained by the JSC, is “deeply concerning”, says Judges Matter.

KwaZulu-Natal Judge Jacqueline Henriques will face a Judicial Conduct Tribunal. It will probe allegations of incapacity, gross incompetence and gross misconduct in relation to a judgment she failed to deliver in 2013.

Henriques has often featured on the late judgments’ lists released by the Office of the Chief Justice, with some judgments outstanding for up to three years.

But the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) will focus on a matter she presided over in the Northern Cape High Court.

When Judge President Frans Kgomo (now retired) laid the complaint against her with the JSC in December 2016, the judgment in the matter between PJ Schrooder v Minister of Police and Director of Public Prosecutions had been outstanding for three years and five months. It had still not been delivered at that time.

According to the JSC, she had heard the argument and reserved judgment on 26 July 2013.

While the Judicial Conduct Committee (JCC) took a decision to recommend to the JSC that the matter be referred to a tribunal in September 2017, that decision was ultimately only taken by the JSC in April 2025 and finalised this month.

The JSC has not explained this lapse in time, other than to say there was “administrative oversight” and referencing a “transcript” of the JCC deliberations, indicating the possible loss of the original report.

Advocacy group Judge’s Matter legal researcher Mbekezeli Benjamin said this is “deeply concerning” and raises questions about the integrity of the JSC’s administrative processes and the need for the JSC to be more transparent and to have dedicated staff.

“The allegations facing Judge Henriques are serious — not only is she being disciplined for failure to deliver a judgment on time, but the JSC decision points to discrepancies in her explanations for the delay, which go to her integrity. We therefore hope the Chief Justice will urgently set up the tribunal so that these issues are dealt with once and for all,” he said.

In its report on the issue, the JSC said ordinarily the failure of a judge to hand down a judgment within three months would not be impeachable conduct, but it supported the JCC’s recommendation to establish the tribunal because the conduct of Henriques was “more serious”. This was because of the excessive delay in handing down the judgment in question, and some of the “apparent implausible” explanations she had given in response to the complaint by Kgomo during proceedings before the JCC and in her exchanges with the JSC.

“The Commission has taken the view that there are material disputes of facts when the version of Judge Henriques is compared with the written record in the matter and the version presented by Kgomo. These disputes can only be resolved by a tribunal. If these allegations are established, they may reflect negatively on her credibility.”

Another reason given by the JSC was “the failure by Judge Henriques to fully appreciate the nature of her duties as a judge to ensure that judgments are timeously delivered, and when this cannot be done for some reason or another, to ensure that appropriate arrangements are made with the JP of the division”.

Henriques applied for and was shortlisted for the position of KZN Deputy Judge President in October 2024 but withdrew her candidacy.

A source told GroundUp that this was because of the potential disciplinary proceedings pending against her at that time.

GroundUp previously reported on one of her several delayed judgments in which she reserved judgment in July 2020 and delivered it at the end of June 2023.

In her judgment, she attributed the delay as being caused by not having secretarial support, which she had brought to the attention of the OCJ and her judicial bosses, as well as the complexity of the matter.

GroundUp has also previously reported that the OCJ published reserved judgment reports three or four times a year, typically after each court term. But in recent years, reports have come out irregularly.

In the 2024 third term report, Henriques is only listed as having one late judgment. She heard it in November 2023 and handed it down at the end July 2024.

On the 2024 fourth term list, the latest available, she is not listed as having any late judgments.

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.