By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Two court applications relating to former president Jacob Zuma’s private prosecution of prosecutor, advocate Billy Downer, and News24 legal journalist Karyn Maughan were heard in the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in Pietermaritzburg.
Maughan filed an urgent application against Zuma, asking the KwaZulu-Natal High Court to scrap his private prosecution against her in its entirety.
Downer made a similar application.
In asking the court to set the matter aside, Maughan stated that Zuma did not obtain a nolle prosequi certificate against her.
The certificate is key to Zuma being procedurally allowed to privately prosecute.
The certificate would ordinarily come from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and would state that the NPA had declined to prosecute the matter.
Maughan also asserted that Zuma abused the court process to intimidate, harass and bully her to prevent her from further reporting on his corruption case. She also argued that the former president did not suffer any injury as a result of her published work and that the private prosecution, therefore, didn’t have any legal standing.
Downer has also filed an application asking for the prosecution to be scrapped.
Addressing a full bench on Monday, Maughan’s lawyer, Advocate Steven Budlender, said Zuma brought the charges against his client because of the former president’s “extraordinary animosity towards her”.
Zuma, Budlender said, did not like the way in which Maughan has been covering the former president’s arms deal corruption case – where Zuma has been accused of taking bribes from French arms company Thales, during the country’s arms procurement programme in the 90s.
In his private prosecution, Zuma is accusing Downer of leaking the former president’s medical report to Maughan.
This, Budlender said, was despite the fact that the medical report was a public document which contained “nothing confidential”.
Budlender told the court that it was “astonishing” that Zuma was intent on dragging Maughan to a criminal court despite the fact that it was not the journalist who leaked the medical report.
Advocate Kate Hofmeyr, who is representing the Helen Suzman Foundation which successfully applied to be part of the case, told the court that Zuma was prosecuting Downer and Maughan for an “ulterior purpose”.
Zuma, Hofmeyr said, was abusing the private prosecution purpose to achieve what the process was not established for.
To demonstrate that Zuma had an ulterior motive, Hofmeyr used the witness list which Zuma submitted to the court as part of his private prosecution.
Hofmeyr said, was merely ticking the boxes just to ensure that Downer and Maughan were put on trial.
Downer’s lawyer, Advocate Geoff Budlender, SC told the court Zuma’s case against the senior prosecutor was “meritless”.
Budlender. SC said, Zuma has failed to demonstrate that he has a winnable case against Downer.
Zuma, who lost a series of court cases where he has been demanding the removal of Downer from the arms deal case, insists that his rights were on a number of occasions violated by Downer and other National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) officials involved in his arms deal case.
However, Budlender told the court that several courts have found that none of Zuma’s rights were violated since the start of the arms deal case about two decades ago.
The case will continue on Wednesday.
Watch live in the video below:
Video Courtesy of SABC.