The Powers of the South African Public Protector: A Note on Economic Freedom Fighters v Speaker of the National Assembly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The scope of the powers of the Public Protector was one of the main questions for determination by the Constitutional Court in the landmark case of Economic Freedom Fighters vs Speaker of the National Assembly. This note critically examines that case, especially in relation to its finding that the remedial actions of the Public Protector have a binding effect. The note argues that the court erred by ignoring the text and history of the Constitution in its interpretations of the powers of the Public Protector. We argue that the Court got it wrong when it dismissed an argument that the powers of the Public Protector should be sourced from the Public Protector Act and not directly from the Constitution. In its critical analysis of Economic Freedom Fighters vs Speaker of the National Assembly, the note engages with two other related decisions from lower courts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.026 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".