Aging magistrates a test

By HELEN TARAWA
THE large number of aging magistrates is the biggest challenge facing the Magisterial Services, Chief Magistrate Nerrie Eliakim says.
Eliakim said it was frightening because there were more magistrates who had already served for 10 years or longer.
“When we put the magistrates into the four different groups of the number of services, we noticed that the more-than-10-years group was the largest. “For me that’s frightening because it tells us that we’ve got a huge number of aging magistrates,” Eliakim said.
“We hope that with the senior magistrates that we currently have from this consultation, they will be able to help us and the new magistrates that have come on board to help us also identify what challenges they have during their time and to recommend to us to improve from where we are now.”
She said Magisterial Services has been recruiting new magistrates every year since she took up the post in 2014.
“For us, it’s also increasing capacity, having training for magistrates including the judgment writing workshop last week,” she said.
“We had a good number of our magistrates who have undergone these training programmes from the provinces and NCD.
“We need money to do that, one of the challenges is the funding aspect of training.
“There are magistrates that are quite diverse in their range of employment and their years of service and experience is quite large.
“The conference will improve efficiency on the bench.
“We’ve got 92 magistrates and I’m confident that with the feedback that they will provide us, we will continue with resourcing.
“We’ve got a ceiling of a 126 but recruitment has been a challenge and this year we’ve got another eight or nine more.”