The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) registrar has granted an application for dates in the filing of an application for leave to appeal brought by the Fair Trade Tobacco Association (Fita), notes a News24 report.
It approached the SCA after the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) dismissed its legal challenge to the ban on tobacco sales. The SCA directed that President Cyril Ramaphosa has to deliver his answering affidavit in an application for leave to appeal brought by Fita by no later than Friday 7 August at 15:00. Fita, in turn, must file its replying affidavit to that of Ramaphosa, if any, by no later than Tuesday 11 August at 15:00.
In their affidavits, the parties must motivate why the request for leave to appeal either should, or should not, be granted.
Fita had approached the SCA for direct access to appeal the High Court’s dismissal of its challenge to South Africa’s four-month-old ban on cigarette sales. The Mercury reports Fita chair Sinenhlanhla Mnguni submitted in an affidavit to the SCA that the case is “overwhelmingly of national importance and interest and pertains to novel and critically important issues of both fact and law”.
Its appeal bid is based on 10 legal grounds. Some go well beyond the cigarette ban and speak to the extent of the Minister’s powers and the legal thresholds she needs to clear in terms of the Disaster Management Act to impose restrictions on the public, Mnguni said. He also disputed the High Court’s view that Fita’s arguments against the ban in the main attacked the rationality of the measure the Minister imposed with the stated aim of protecting the country’s health services during the COVID-19 pandemic, and not whether she had met the threshold for necessity contained in the law.
Mnguni said the necessity of the Minister’s actions had formed a central part of the arguments before the court in June, and argued that an objective reading of the law meant that she was obliged to consider whether less drastic means would still achieve her objectives.
Fita said that evidence suggesting only a fraction of the country’s estimated 7m smokers have quit since the end of March means the ban was irrational because her reasoning had proven flawed. The association also stressed in the application to the ban did not contain credible evidence that a prohibition would prompt widespread smoking cessation.
[link url="http://themercury.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/showarticle.aspx?article=7ae94d38-1e87-4b43-8a1c-9238f477c373&key=6yzgi7OjW7p%2fH%2bAdybbp4g%3d%3d&issue=64032020080300000000001001"]Full report in The Mercury (subscription needed)[/link]