Appeal against unconstitutional lockdown ruling will ‘end up as an academic exercise’
By Mwangi Githahu 
5m ago
Cape Town – The lockdown regulations remain in force until the appeal against the recent ruling by the North Gauteng High Court declaring them unconstitutional is heard and determined, according to the Legislature’s legal adviser.
Advocate Romeo Maasdorp told the ad hoc committee on Covid-19 that it was likely that the appeal would end up an academic exercise, given the expected new round of regulations following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the nation on Wednesday night.
This emerged during a discussion between the ad hoc committee and the Legislature’s Legal Support unit on the Gauteng High Court judgment in respect of De Beer vs the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
Answering a question from committee, chairperson Mireille Wenger, Maasdorp said: “It will largely be an academic exercise, but a necessary one because in the judgement there was a legal faux pas in terms of the application of certain principles and the confusion of the rationality test with the reasonableness test.”
Committee member Andricus Westhuizen asked: “If the regulations are proved unlawful, will people who were arrested or fined under the regulations have any kind of recourse?”
Maasdorp said: “If someone has been arrested for having contravened particular regulations, that arrest stands. However if subsequent to that the provisions or the legal framework which gave grounds for that arrests are deemed unconstitutional, there will be grounds for the individual to seek legal recourse.”
The ruling declared Levels 3 and 4 of the lockdown regulations unconstitutional, saying “some of the regulations promulgated by the government simply did not meet the rationality test in preventing the spread of Covid-19”.
It followed an urgent application by a group who called themselves the Liberty Fighters Network, in which they asked the court to declare the national state of disaster, established under the Disaster Management Act, unconstitutional and unlawful.
Reyno de Beer, of Derdepoort in Pretoria, who represented the group in court, said the Disaster Management Act regulations were invalid and illegal as they violated the rights of almost every citizen in the country.
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