Revising spousal testimonial privilege and marital communications privilege in South African criminal procedure: Is abolition or extension the answer? Part 2
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although South Africa has not directly grappled with whether to extend the protection of the marital privileges to cohabitant life partners, Canada has. The ‘marital privileges’ refer to spousal testimonial privilege and marital communications privilege, collectively, in this article. In 2015, the Canadian legislature abolished spousal testimonial privilege. The marital communications privilege has been retained, and the Canadian courts have considered whether to extend it to cohabitant life partners or abolish it. To gain perspective on whether the marital privileges in South Africa should be retained but reformed, the authors discuss the position in Canada, a constitutionally comparable democracy. The authors consider the scope and applicability of the marital privileges before and after the 2015 Canadian amendments,1 which abrogated spousal testimonial privilege. The authors discuss the abrogation of spousal testimonial privilege in Canada and consider its relevance in the South African context. Also considered is why the marital communications privilege has been retained. This research suggests that while the central rationale for retaining the marital communications privilege is to foster marital relationships and protect the right to privacy, the rationale of dignity also plays a key role. The authors also consider the decision of the European Court of Human Rights dealing with marital communications privilege in The Netherlands. Finally, it will be submitted that whichever view one takes, the marital privileges in South Africa should not be retained in their current form.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".