The Justice Project South Africa (JPSA) has issued a statement hoping to clarify the process of criminal prosecution that would have to be undertaken by the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) for non-payment of e-tolls.
According to the JPSA, SANRAL’s chief financial officer (CFO) Inge Mulder claimed the courts could easily cope with volumes of e-toll prosecutions SANRAL intends on filing.
“Whilst it is true that SANRAL may indeed, through the clerk of the court, issue a single summons to an individual – citing multiple counts of the same offence, it is not true that ‘bulk decisions will be made’ against similar cases as was suggested by John Robbie and agreed with by Ms Mulder,” the JPSA said.
The JPSA said each offender would have to be summoned individually, following normal procedures that apply in line with the Criminal Procedure Act.
It said SANRAL would have to issue final demands to an individual by registered mail, if ignored, a summons would need to be issued, court dates would need to be issued for each of the individual summonses before being delivered by an approved individual; at which point the court could hear the complaint.
It said an individual could only get a criminal record if they pay an admission of guilt fine or were found guilty in court.
The organisation said the Mulder is “somewhat optimistic” to think the courts could “process a huge amount of them every day” given their current workload.
“[There are] 1.3 million users at minimum who are not registered. If a mere 10 per cent of those people do not pay, then 130,000 individual summonses will have to be issued and served and those who don’t pay admission of guilt fines – thereby automatically incurring a criminal record – will have to be tried in court,” the JPSA said.
The group said the collective magistrates courts in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni would not be able to deal with these sorts of volumes.
“Whatever happens, a ‘test case’ will have to be brought before the High Court to establish whether the methodology behind e-toll prosecutions is correct and indeed, whether defaulters may be prosecuted in the manner that SANRAL is proposing,” it said.
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