Ramaphosa Stopped His Impeachment Hearings 2 To 1
The Western Cape High Court has halted President Ramaphosa’s impeachment hearings on a 2 to 1 vote. Most coverage named the 3 judges and stopped there, missing which one dissented, and a passage at paragraph 60 where the losing judge takes apart the Constitutional Court authority the majority relied on.
The Western Cape High Court has stopped Parliament’s impeachment hearings against President Cyril Ramaphosa. The judgment, delivered on 24 July 2026, ran to 125 paragraphs and split the bench 2 to 1. Most of the coverage on the day named the 3 judges and went no further. It did not report which of them dissented, and it did not report that the judge who wanted the impeachment to proceed was outvoted by the most senior judge in the room.
The ruling grants the President an interim interdict, freezing the Section 89 committee’s public hearings until a separate review is decided. That review, which challenges the legality of the independent panel report on which the whole impeachment rests, is set down for 2 to 4 September 2026 under case number 2026-119192. The interdict application itself is case number 2026-138228.
Who actually formed the majority
The judgment contains 3 separate opinions, one from each judge. Judge Francis wrote what the document labels the first judgment. Judge Davis wrote the second. Acting Deputy Judge President le Grange wrote a short third opinion.
Francis would have dismissed the President’s application in full and ordered him to pay the costs. His is the dissent. Davis granted the interdict, and le Grange agreed with her. The majority is therefore Davis and le Grange, and the judge who wanted the hearings to carry on was Francis, sitting alone.
The confusion in the reporting has a simple cause. Francis’s dissent is labelled the first judgment because it appears first in the document, and several outlets appear to have read that ordering as a statement of which view prevailed. It was not.
The rule at the centre of the case
The dispute turns on a single provision of the National Assembly rules. Rule 129G governs what the independent panel had to decide before the matter could go to a full impeachment enquiry. The President argues that the rule required the panel to find sufficient evidence against him, and that the panel instead applied a lower test by asking only whether there was a prima facie case. His advocate, Wim Trengove SC, described the rule as a protective buffer standing between an accusation and a public hearing.
Francis addressed the argument directly. He reasoned that the panel is barred from holding hearings or calling witnesses and may not decide guilt at all. A body confined in that way, he found, can only be asking whether there is enough to justify an enquiry, which is the same question as whether a prima facie case exists. On that reading, he concluded that the President’s central ground has poor prospects when the review is heard in September.
Davis did not answer that reading of the rule. She held instead that the court should not decide who is right about Rule 129G at the interim stage at all. At this stage, she reasoned, the President need only show a serious question worth putting to the review court, not that his interpretation is ultimately correct.
That is a lower threshold, and it has a real foundation. Davis relied on the Constitutional Court’s judgment in the Eskom matter, which cautions lower courts against demanding too much certainty about a review’s prospects before the review has been heard. Eskom is binding on her, and it allowed her to grant the interdict without deciding whether the President is right about the rule.
The passage that went unreported
The most pointed exchange in the judgment sits at Francis’s paragraph 60, and it received no coverage.
There is a coincidence in the naming of judgments. In the Eskom matter, the opinion the Constitutional Court criticised was also called the first judgment. In this ruling, Francis’s dissent is also called the first judgment. When Davis quotes Eskom saying that the first judgment pitched the standard too high, the words read as though the apex court had already condemned the very thing Francis wrote.
Francis pointed out that they had not. The words came from Justice Madlanga, and in that case he was addressing the minority judgment of Acting Justice Unterhalter in a matter about electricity supply. Madlanga was correcting a colleague in a different case, not laying down a general rule about interim applications. Francis wrote that the emphasis placed on those words should not be read as though the Constitutional Court had pronounced on what he had written. Neither Davis nor le Grange engaged with the point.
Rule of law harm
The majority also introduced a consideration Davis named for herself. She called it rule of law harm.
Her reasoning is that if the hearings proceed now and the panel report is later found unlawful, the country will have sat through a process that should never have taken place. Allowing that, she held, would cheapen the rule of law, and the rule of law would be made to look like an ass. She added that once the hearings happen the genie will have been let out of the bottle, and no later court order can undo what the public has already watched.
Francis had a direct answer. Every preliminary step in every legal process could later be set aside. If that possibility on its own justified halting a process, then no preliminary decision could ever be challenged without an interdict following automatically, and that is not the law. His sharper objection concerns weighing. Davis gave decisive weight to the prospect that the report might later be found unlawful while declining to assess how likely that prospect is. A court that refuses to measure the strength of a review, Francis reasoned, cannot then treat the likelihood of its success as the heaviest factor in the balance.
A pause with no ceiling
The judgment also carries a detail that unsettles the description of the interdict as a short delay.
The President asked only for a pause until the review is decided in September. Francis, reading the President’s replying affidavit, found a further indication. Should the review fail, the affidavit signals that the President may then seek an additional stay while he appeals that outcome. A restraint of that reach, Francis warned, could hold the committee’s work in suspense for years, and section 237 of the Constitution requires constitutional obligations to be performed without delay.
Davis dealt with the timing by reasoning that a delay of a few months, or at worst until February 2027, does not amount to significant harm. She did not address the prospect of appeals. Neither did le Grange. The pause that opposition parties are already describing as temporary has no outer limit written into the judgment.
What happens next
The interim interdict holds until the review is determined. That hearing is scheduled for 2 to 4 September 2026, with judgment expected to follow. Should the President succeed there, the panel report may be set aside and the impeachment falls away. Should he fail, the hearings resume, subject to whatever further application he may bring.
For now, the record shows a President who has stopped his own impeachment hearings on a 2 to 1 vote, with the single dissenting judge having tested his central argument, found it wanting, and been outvoted by two colleagues who did not answer the objection he raised.
