Gauteng's Mandatory Mediation Directive Survives Legal Challenge
A challenge to Gauteng's mandatory mediation directive has collapsed - not on the merits, but on a procedural technicality. In Pipla and Others v Judge President of the Gauteng Division, a coalition of personal injury lawyers, individual claimants, and the Law Society of South Africa asked the High Court to strike down a directive requiring litigants to mediate before their cases could be enrolled for trial.
Issued in April 2025 amid mounting pressure on Road Accident Fund litigation, the directive required parties to attend mediation and file a mediator's report before trial enrolment. The applicants argued this went beyond the court's power to regulate process under Section 173 of the Constitution and effectively created a barrier to justice for indigent litigants; the respondents defended it as a rational case-management tool.
The court never got to rule on that question. Before reaching the substance, it upheld a preliminary objection from the Judge President's side: under Section 47(1) of the Superior Courts Act, no civil proceedings may be instituted against a judge without the prior consent of the Chief Justice. The applicants had approached the Chief Justice for consent only after they had already filed their application-and the court found that sequencing fatal.
Citing precedent that this consent requirement is jurisdictional and peremptory, the court held that proceedings launched without it are a nullity from inception, incapable of being cured retroactively. The court also criticised the applicants' letter to the Chief Justice as misleading, since it implied the application was still pending when it had, in fact, already been issued.
Notably, the court did rule in the applicants' favour on two threshold issues—confirming they had standing under Section 38 of the Constitution, and allowing the Law Society of South Africa to be joined as a co-applicant—before ultimately dismissing the whole application as void, with costs against the applicants. The upshot: the legal validity of mandatory mediation in Gauteng remains untested. Anyone wanting to challenge the directive will need to start over, and get their procedural ducks in a row first.
Read full judgment here:
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