The Judicial Service Commission, working hand in hand with the Office of the President, deserve to be given due credit for finally identifying appointing ten new High Court Judges.  The Principle Judge, Justice James Munange Ogola, deserves a lot of credit too.  It is he who has over the course several years shouted his voice hoarse trying to maintain pressure on the relevant authorities to appoint new Judges to help deal with the huge case backlog.  As Principle Judge, he was indeed in the best possible position to pass judgement on the deficit on the Bench.

Most practicing Lawyers in Uganda today will tell you of their daily struggles, many times without success, just to get their cases cause listed.  The pressure from their clients has sometimes forced them try underhand methods to influence the process.  The responsible Clerks know of the existence of that pressure and they sometimes take full advantage of it by demanding “something”; hence the corruption that we hear about in the Judiciary on an almost daily basis.  So the appointment of 10 new Judges, whilst not enough, will no doubt go some way towards mitigating this problem. 

So we call upon the relevant authorities not be complacent.  They must double their efforts in their search for more men and women of impeccable integrity for appointment to the Bench.  We mustn’t forget too, that the knock on effect of a Lawyer’s failure to get his or her client’s case heard expeditiously inevitably means that justice for his or her client/s is severely delayed.  That, as we all know, can never be good thing.

Finally, we all know that a credible and efficient system of administering justice is one of the fundamental hallmarks of a democracy.  So, as we congratulate our new Judges upon their appointments, we must also remind them that they have, though their work, a crucial role in strengthening the basic foundations of the democracy that we are all fighting to build in Uganda.