Lawyers told to pursue cases

ONE of the reasons why court cases are piling up is because lawyers and prosecutors are not pursuing them, acting Chief Magistrate Nerrie Eliakim says.
They become backlogged because there are no follow-ups, she said.
In fact, any case that remains in the registries for more than two years will now be regarded as backlogged, Eliakim said.
She said measures were being taken to cut down on the backlog.
“So there’s a lot of factors that contribute to backlog. One is parties not coming forward to prosecute the matter,” Eliakim said.
“Counsels, the lawyers, are not coming forward to prosecute the case, they are just leaving it there. So that’s leading towards our backlog.
“Parties usually go and file cases, they just come to court and get one particular order they are interested in and then they go for good.
“The courts cannot fast-track cases, the parties must come to court and if the parties are not coming to the registry to follow up on their cases, then the case will still remain in the registry because no one has come forth.
“We identify all the cases that have been registered for more than two years in our system and then each of the locations now will have to do audit of their files in their own court locations.”
Eliakim said district courts had incorporated the use of summary determination lists to clear cases that had exceeded two years in the registry.
She said courts clerks in their respective locations would be going through their registries to create their summary determination lists. Eliakim could not provide a figure on how many backlogged cases there were due to differences in the magisterial services data system.
“We’ve got a figure but it is still yet to be verified. What they (court clerks) have been giving us is what has been inputted into the data management system.
“We have noted that there is a huge difference between the manual data (written) and what’s actually in the registry, plus what has been put into the system.”