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Judge President L P Tlaletsi

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Capacity: Judge President (Northern Cape High Court)
First appointed as a judge: November 2003 (Northern Cape High Court)

Further appointments: Judge President of NC | Deputy Judge President of the Labour Court/Labour Appeals Court

Gender: Male
Ethnicity: African

Date of Birth: November 1960

Qualifications: BProc (1985) LLB (1987)(Unibo), Cert. Dep (1999)(Unisa)

Key judgments:

Candidate Bio

Judge President Lazarus Pule Tlaletsi is the Judge President of the Northern Cape High Court.

Judge President Tlaletsi has been nominated by the president as a candidate to fill the position of Deputy Chief Justice in South Africa. To fill this vacancy, Tlaletsi will need to show that he has the ability and experience to join Chief Justice Maya in providing strong leadership to the judiciary while it is facing a variety of challenges. Beyond this, he will also need to be prepared to chair various committees including the Judicial Conduct Committee that is currently facing a record number of complaints.

Within less than a year Judge President Tlaletsi has swopped his seat as the question-asker to the questioned, and will certainly face a flurry of questions posed to him in order to determine whether he is the right man for this important job.

Aiding to his appointability is Judge President Tlaletsi’s vast experience in the judiciary. After seven months of acting experience, Tlaletsi was appointed to the Northern Cape High Court in November of 2003. During his career in the judiciary he has acted in the Labour Court, Labour Appeal Court, the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court. Beyond this he was appointed to the Labour Appeal Court in 2010, selected as the Deputy Judge President of the Labour and Labour Appeal Court in 2013 and four years later promoted to Judge President of the Northern Cape where he still currently sits. With twenty-two years of  judicial experience and two leadership positions, Tlaletsi is well equipped for the position he has been nominated for.

As a Judge and a Judge President he has made several significant contributions to the law in South Africa. These contributions have taken the form of mentoring aspirant judges in the Northern Cape Division of the High Court, organising a stakeholders’ conference on effective service delivery of justice services in the Northern Cape, serving as a member of the Judicial Case Flow Management Committee, as well as participating in judicial training and workshops under SAJEI.

Another form of his contributions are the judgments handed down by him. In a seminal judgment, Kievets Kroon Country Estate (PTY) Ltd v Mmoledi and Others, Judge President Tlaletsi mainstreamed traditional belief into labour law practise. A worker, Johanna Mmoledi, was dismissed for absconding from work, after being denied unpaid leave, after she began to twasa (the process of becoming a sangoma) following advice from a traditional healer she had visited to treat what was initially thought to be an illness. The employee genuinely held a belief stemming from a cultural conviction that her life would be threatened unless she completed the training.

The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration found that Mmoledi’s firing amounted to unfair dismissal, which both the labour and labour appeal courts upheld. In writing his majority judgment for the Labour Appeal Court, JP Tlaletsi found that Mmoledi was not sick in the “conventional sense” but was “in a ‘condition’” where she was experiencing “a calling from her ancestors” to train to become a sangoma.

He ruled that employees should not “trivialise” beliefs which they may not subscribe to but, rather, allow for reasonable accommodation of these beliefs into the workplace.

“A paradigm shift is necessary and one must appreciate the kind of society we live in. Accommodating one another is nothing else but “botho” or “Ubuntu” which is part of our heritage as a society,” wrote Tlaletsi. There was no costs order.

In the matter of AK v Minister of Police, while acting at the Constitutional Court, JP Tlaletsi was faced with a matter which concerned one of the biggest issues facing South Africa, gender-based violence. In this matter, the Constitutional Court had to determine whether the South African Police Service had negligently failed to complete a search and investigation when the applicant had gone missing and been raped, which resulted in her suffering serious psychological and psychiatric trauma.

The Supreme Court of Appeal held that the police weren’t negligent and dismissed the applicant’s appeal. JP Tlaletsi had to determine whether the SAPS acted reasonably considering the resources available to them to protect the applicant. “The state has a duty to protect women against all forms of gender-based violence that impair their enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms.”, was a sentiment emphasised in the judgment penned by Tlaletsi.

The majority judgment found that the police had acted negligently with regard to how they made use of the resources available to them. It was also found that the investigation conducted by the police was riddled with flaws, and as a consequence the Minister of Police was found liable for the damages, with the amount needing to be proved or agreed to.

Before joining the judiciary, Tlaletsi was a practicing attorney from 1989 to 2003 at Gura Tlaletsi Inc, where he was also a Director of the firm. During this period he was a member of Nadel (National Association of Democratic Lawyers) where he participated in various conferences before 1994 which dealt with human rights issues, reshaping the structures of justice and the Constitution for a democratic South Africa. Judge President Tlaletsi views as one of his significant contribution to the law, as it also included conducting workshops in rural areas to teach people about various aspects of the law, and participating in free legal advice projects where he would appear on behalf of the indigent and marginalised.

Watch JSC Deputy Judge President Interviwe of Judge President L P Tlaletsi – July 2025

Deputy Chief Justice Interview Synopsis

Judge President Tlaletsi’s interview began with light-heartedness, which he infused throughout the session. The Chief Justice guided the discussion through his academic and professional career, highlighting the Judge President’s extensive experience as a leader in the judiciary.

A key moment in any leadership interview is when the candidate outlines their vision for the court they hope to lead. In the case of the Deputy Chief Justice, this part of the interview is especially significant, as the candidate’s vision impacts not only the Constitutional Court but the judiciary as a whole.

Judge President Tlaletsi’s vision began with a reflection on why he joined the judiciary. Making himself available for judicial appointment in 2003, he explained, was because he was convinced that he “had to take forward the pursuit of justice and human rights by taking up a position on the bench. The project was to transform the judiciary to be representative of the South African society and its constitutional imperatives.” Since then, he noted, he has been privileged to serve the people of South Africa in various capacities throughout his judicial career.

A core element of his vision is the belief in true and meaningful access to justice for all. This means justice should not be reserved for the rich, but must be accessible to all South Africans, enabling the equal realisation of the right to access justice.

He acknowledged that part of the barrier to realising access to justice lies in the difficulties the public face in court processes. Tlaletsi stressed that the rules, directives, and procedures required to prepare and present cases for adjudication should be simple and easily understandable, especially in the magistrates’ courts. To address this, he proposed the removal of rules that impede access to justice and recommended that practice directives be standardised across all High Court divisions.

Another proposal was that court judgments should be written in plain language, free of legalese, to ensure they are easily understood by the public. He added that judgments setting precedent or impacting daily life should be translated into all official languages to broaden their reach and impact.

Advocate Ngcukaitobi challenged Tlaletsi on the feasibility of translating all judgments, asking whether he had considered the judiciary’s financial constraints when proposing. The Minister of Justice followed up, noting that while the project is important, it would take time to implement due to limitations in the current technology for indigenous languages. However, she acknowledged the value such an initiative would bring to access to justice. On this point, the Chief Justice affirmed that promoting indigenous languages is part of her vision, and she supported the proposal.

When asked by Justice Molemela about his priorities for addressing the challenges in the judiciary, Tlaletsi identified key areas: the capacitation of courts, improved security, and the general state of court infrastructure and maintenance. All of these, he noted, directly impact access to justice.

“I do not need to be appointed Deputy Chief Justice to support the Chief Justice and the judiciary; I’ve already pledged my full support to you, Chief Justice, in your project for the judiciary. I believe that if appointed to the position, I will be capable of supporting the Chief Justice, and as required, I will do my best to ensure that her vision is achieved,” said Tlaletsi, when asked whether he would be able to adjust to being second in command.

The commissioners posed a range of questions, including his interpretation of the Constitution, whether it is working as intended, his views on attacks against the judiciary, the application of judicial principles, and the challenges currently facing the Constitutional Court.

However, it was a question by Advocate Pillay about whether sexual harassment is an issue in the judiciary that triggered a flurry of follow-up questions from commissioners. “I wouldn’t say it’s an issue that I have identified as a problem. I am aware of an instance that has gone public with those allegations, but I am not aware of—or I could say it is a problem as such. But one should not rest and say it is not a problem because there could be those you are not even aware of, so having an anti-sexual harassment policy will assist in opening up and making us aware that there is this problem,” responded Judge President Tlaletsi.

During the exchange, Chief Justice Maya pointed out that his division was the only one that did not support the draft Anti-Sexual Harassment Policy when it was circulated. She asked for assurance that he genuinely supports the policy and recognises the need for it, which he confirmed. However, his answers did not appear to fully satisfy the commissioners, with the line of questioning concluding with remarks from Commissioner Malema.

Throughout the interview, Judge President Tlaletsi maintained a calm demeanour and demonstrated deep knowledge and leadership. His judicial leadership experience and commitment to constitutional democracy and access to justice reflect why he is regarded as one of the judiciary’s senior figures.

April 2017 interview

Interview Synopsis

When members of the rightwing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging invaded Mafikeng in 1994 to prop up the Bophutatswana bantustan regime of Lucas Mangope, several came to a bloody end.

The photographs of white men begging for their lives, while others lay dead on the road, appeared to shatter any remaining misconceptions of white supremacy.

Mangope’s regime sought to prosecute local policemen, in some cases without proper investigation which led to incidents of mistaken identities, to make a quick example to the local population and stem further insurrection. Northern Cape Deputy-Judge President Pule Tlaletsi told the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) that he and other lawyers had, however, acted to ensure those arrested had proper legal cover and that due process was followed.

When asked by commissioner Tabani Masuku, an advocate and one of four presidential representatives to the Judicial Service Commission, his one “indispensable quality of a judge president,” Tlaletsi said: “To be open and in control.”

Highlighting that the Northern Cape, while sparsely populated, is the biggest province in terms of land mass, Tlaletsi said one of the main challenges facing the population there as “people have to travel long distances to come to court”.

Tlaletsi later said that he would address the challenge by working closely with the magistracy, consult community leaders to discover what the main problems were and investigate whether strengthening access to pro-bono legal advice and the Legal Aid Board would help address the situation.

He said judgments reserved for inordinately long periods were “not that much of a problem” in the division and told the commission that his approach too dealing with tardy judges would be to first “monitor progress” before engaging judges to “find out what the problems would be” and rectifying the situation.

Tlaletsi said he would “be careful not to reward laziness” by taking judges with outstanding judgments out of courts so that they would have time to complete them.

But public service and administration minister Faith Muthambi, sitting in for the justice minister, quizzed Tlaletsi on his own record in handing down judgments. Pointing out that the General Council of the Bar had been critical of him of being “prone to unreasonable delay” Muthambi asked if it was “acceptable” that the judge had several outstanding judgments going back seven-eight months.

Tlaletsi said most of these judgments were in the Labour Appeal Court and had been delayed because other judges on the panel had to have “a bite at it”.

His spat with other judges (see profiles of Tlaletsi -above and Majiedt) was also raised and Tlaletsi said the matter had been resolved and “once due process has been followed… one must move on with life”.