Taking stock of Chief Justice Mandisa Maya’s first year in office

The first of September 2025 marks one year since the historic appointment of Chief Justice Mandisa Maya as the first woman to become South Africa’s top judge.

In her first year, Chief Justice Maya has achieved notable successes, including introducing a revised sexual harassment policy for the judiciary and helping to resolve a decades-long impasse over the judiciary’s institutional independence.

In her first year, Chief Justice Maya has achieved notable successes, including introducing a revised sexual harassment policy for the judiciary and helping to resolve a decades-long impasse over the judiciary’s institutional independence.

However, there are also areas where progress has been slow. These include implementing the 2023 judges’ conference resolutions on reforming the judicial misconduct system and restoring the credibility of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) so that it can attract suitable candidates to the bench. Concerns have also been raised that the sheer weight of the role is taking her away from her primary judicial duties.

In this article, Judges Matter takes stock of Chief Justice Maya’s first year in office.

Judicial independence and governance of the judiciary

While many viewed Maya’s May 2024 interview for Chief Justice as a formality,  close observers of the judiciary recognised it as a key moment to hear her vision.

At the centre of her vision was a decade-long crusade for the judiciary to have independent control over its own court operations, judicial administration, human resources, security, infrastructure and budgets. She also advocated for a  ‘single judiciary’ (judges and magistrates unified under a single department). This, she said at the time, would strengthen judicial independence.

“If I am appointed for this position, I know that I will bear the enormous responsibility of ensuring that the institution remains strong,”  – Mandisa Maya

Soon after taking office on 1 September 2024, Maya began actively engaging the government on judicial institutional independence. She held a series of meetings with Justice Minister Mamoloko Kubayi, Public Works Minister Dean McPherson and, on the sidelines of SONA, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana. Under her leadership, the Heads of Court forum, the judiciary’s central decision-making body, chaired by the Chief Justice, has met more times in the last year than ever before.

Under her leadership, the Heads of Court forum, the judiciary’s central decision-making body, chaired by the Chief Justice, has met more times in the last year than ever before.

These meetings culminated in a pivotal meeting between the executive and the judiciary,  after which President Ramaphosa made his ground-breaking announcement that his government intends to grant the judiciary’s wish for full institutional independence, ending an intractable impasse. If implemented, alongside the finance minister’s February 2025 budget speech commitment of additional funding for the judiciary, it could mark a decisive turning point for South Africa’s courts.

The announcement comes at a crucial moment. Courts are battling crumbling infrastructure, severe underfunding, staff shortages, and overwhelming caseloads that delay justice and erode public trust. It also responds to persistent calls from judges, magistrates, legal professionals, and civil society to protect the courts from political interference and safeguard judicial integrity.

Still, the details matter. Questions remain on how judicial control over staff and budgets would work in practice, and how accountability to Parliament would be managed. Would the Chief Justice, for example, be expected to present the judiciary’s budget in the same way the President or Speaker does for their institutions?

At stake is a structural shift to place the judiciary on an equal footing with the Executive and Parliament, ensuring its independence as a coequal arm of the state.

Sexual harassment policy

Within weeks of taking office, Maya began revising the draft anti-sexual harassment policy for the judiciary. The review would entail proper consultation with the different structures at all levels of the judiciary, focus groups with key sectors such as women’s groups, and input from civil society.

All of this culminated in Maya’s announcement, on 9 August 2025 (National Women’s Day), that the sexual harassment policy will formally come into effect. She stated that the policy was more than an administrative intervention; it signalled a move towards a more gender-conscious and safer judiciary.

The [sexual harassment] policy establishes a culture of a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment and bullying. It aims to dismantle the stubborn culture of silence and the lack of accountability regarding incidents of sexual harassment in the judiciary, while aiming to be victim-centred.

The policy establishes a culture of a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment and bullying. It aims to dismantle the stubborn culture of silence and the lack of accountability regarding incidents of sexual harassment in the judiciary, while aiming to be victim-centred. An independent “gender desk” will provide emotional and legal support to survivors, helping to prevent retraumatisation during reporting.

Significantly, the policy gives victims multiple pathways for addressing sexual harassment complaints, from informal resolution to referring complaints on to formal complaint processes. It also requires training for judicial officers and disciplinary chairs on power dynamics in the workplace, and how poor professional conduct can be experienced as harmful by staff.

The new policy comes at a pivotal moment, as the judiciary and broader legal profession faces a reckoning with sexual harassment, with the investigation into Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge becoming the most high-profile case in the judiciary’s history. While the timing of the policy’s introduction is only coincidental, Maya’s leadership on this issue delivers on her promise at her 2022 interview to introduce the policy.

Her victim-centred approach also reflects her long-standing critique of judicial complacency in gender-based violence cases. At the 2018 Presidential Summit on GBV and Femicide, she said: “…the fate of these victims should not be left to the off-chance that the individual judges hearing their cases will be attuned to the sensitivities.”

Again, while Maya deserves credit for driving the policy to see the light of day, the proof of this pudding will be in the eating. It will be important to see how the gender desk interfaces with formal complaints processes at the Magistrates Commission and the Judicial Service Commission, which are slow and complex, and have antiquated ways of investigation, including aggressive cross-examination.

Leading the Judicial Service Commission

As Chief Justice, Maya chairs the JSC, including overseeing its appointments and disciplinary functions.

No stranger to the body, Maya officially chaired her first interviews in October 2024, and again in April and June 2025. In these sessions, she led with a friendly and humane tone, raising issues such as the challenges faced by working mothers in the profession, as in Judge Siphokazi Jikela’s interview. In those interviews, the JSC was respectful and robustly focused on candidates’ legal experience. Compare this to previous years when the JSC often faced criticism for turning interviews into a spectacle. While the reform of the JSC’s interview processes started under Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, Maya seems to be treading the same path by keeping a tight grip on the interviews. She routinely overrules commissioners who go off-track and largely keeps them to schedule.  This will be vital for the October 2025 sitting:  51 candidates will vie for 22 vacancies across nine superior courts – the largest round since 2021. (View the October 2025 candidates here.)

However, challenges at the JSC still remain.

For several years, the JSC has struggled to fill the vacancies that arose in 2021 when Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng and Justices Sisi Khampepe and Chris Jafta retired. Indeed, the Constitutional Court has not had a full complement of permanent judges since 2016. This phenomenon, University of Cape Town researchers say, is one of the key factors that has led to the Con Court’s slow pace of adjudicating cases and delivering judgments.

Source: N. Ally and L. Boonzier ‘The Constitutional Court’s efficiency: Statistics from the Mogoeng Era, 2010 – 2021, Constitutional Court Review (2022) Vol 1, 317-342 https://doi.org/10.2989/CCR.2022.0012

While the JSC has improved the interview process, it continues to suffer from a perception problem that deters strong candidates from applying. Since 2022, the JSC has tried (and failed) five times to fill the Con Court vacancies. In December 2024, the JSC – now chaired by Maya – did not even advertise the vacancy. In June 2025, when the JSC eventually advertised the 2021 vacancy (plus the vacancy arising from Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga’s retirement), only five candidates could be shortlisted for the two open posts, just enough to meet the bare constitutional minimum. This forced the JSC to readvertise in July, and two more names were added. Surprisingly, one candidate who had previously failed to make the High Court shortlist somehow appeared on the Con Court shortlist. This raises questions about the JSC’s shortlisting criteria. Judges Matter has long advocated for the JSC to apply consistent criteria and standards applied at all stages in the judicial selection process. Maya now needs to lead urgent reforms for the JSC to adopt a strategic human resources approach to judicial appointments.

Challenges with judicial (mis)conduct

As Deputy Chief Justice, Maya chaired the Judicial Conduct Committee (JCC), the JSC’s subcommittee tasked with handling misconduct complaints. She made important reforms to increase transparency: since 2023, all rulings and annual reports have been published online.

Despite this, structural flaws and limited capacity mean misconduct complaints still take far too long to resolve – undermining judicial integrity. Litigants are increasingly using the complaints system to harass judges with frivolous complaints, leaving judges’ reputations under a cloud for years. The 2023 Judges Conference mandated reforms to speed up the complaints process. As Chief Justice, Maya set up a task team, but one year into her tenure, little is publicly known about its progress.

Maya’s absence at the Con Court

In her first year, Maya has carried out several of the more obscure but important roles of the Chief Justice. In April, she hosted the International Association of Women Judges conference; in June, it was the 30^th anniversary of the Constitutional Court; and in July, she chaired interviews for new Independent Electoral Commission members.

But these and other duties have pulled her away from her primary role as the jurisprudential and intellectual leader of the highest court in the land. She has presided over relatively few of the Con Court’s hearings and has yet to author a single judgment as Chief Justice.

As Judges Matter highlighted prior to the Chief Justice interviews in 2022, the modern Chief Justice’s role has grown impossibly large and complex, especially after the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution in 2012. With Ramaphosa’s announcement that even more powers will be ceded from the executive to the judiciary, Maya’s plate will be even fuller.

As we mark the first 365 days of Maya’s tenure as Chief Justice, it’s worth noting her successes in resolving a decade-long impasse on judicial institutional independence, a new sexual harassment policy for the judiciary, and leading a focused JSC. However, the complexities of the role have taken her away from her primary task as a justice of the apex court.

We hope that, as she settles into the role over the next nine years, she will strike a balance between her duty to the court and her duty as head of an institutionally independent arm of state.  South Africa’s judiciary, and public confidence in it, depends on it.

Mbekezeli Benjamin and Dimakatso Nchodu are research and advocacy officers at Judges Matter, a project of the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit, UCT, focused on the appointment of judges and magistrates, their conduct and ethics, and the governance of the judiciary in South Africa.