Is the divorce bill fundamentally flawed?
A bill proposing that regional magistrate’s courts be allowed to grant divorces would create formidable challenges, given problems with fraudulent decrees, MPs heard on Monday. This was the view of the Judicial Officers Association of SA (JOASA) in its submission to the national assembly’s justice committee. It said each regional court would need the equivalent of a registrar equipped and skilled to deal with divorce matters. ‘It will be difficult to institute divorce proceedings in these courts’ “There have been many fraudulent divorce decrees and a central registrar functions efficiently to control this,” the submission states. To impose the duties of divorce court registrars on current civil clerks at the various courts would be highly impractical, it warned.
