The Constitutional Court has agreed to hear the Free State prosecution head’s direct access bid to overturn the ruling that won Ace Magashule’s personal assistant Moroadi Cholota her freedom, reports News24.

Simultaneously, the apex court will also hear the NPA’s application to limit the impact of the crucial extradition judgment that Cholota successfully used to argue that she had been illegally brought back from the US to SA to stand trial for the asbestos tender case.

The Constitutional Court’s agreement to hear the case comes after the NPA filed an urgent application late last month, which contended that the convictions of thousands of extradited criminals may be overturned if it did not urgently intervene to limit the impact of the SCA’s decision given in favour of US-based celebrity artist Johnathan Schultz.

According to DPP in the NPA’s international co-operation component Luckson Mgiba, the May 2024 ruling may result in people who have been extradited to SA and found guilty now being able to challenge their convictions.

‘Thousands of people have over the decades been extradited to South Africa at the initiative of the NPA or its predecessors’, he stated in papers filed at the Constitutional Court.

Are all of them entitled to have their trials and convictions set aside? 

At present, without the retrospective application of Schultz being tempered, if these people approach a High Court, the binding answer, which the High Court must give is: Yes. The result will be catastrophic for our criminal justice system.’

He contends that not just ‘(t)he lawfulness of not just South Africa’s current and pending extradition requests, but even past extradition requests has now been thrown into doubt’ by the SCA’s Schultz ruling.

Cholota used the Schultz judgment to successfully challenge the legality of her extradition from the US.

The SCA ruled in that case that only the Minister of Justice and not the NPA could seek Schultz’s extradition from the US.

Because the NPA had sought Cholota’s extradition from the US, Free State High Court (Bloemfontein) judge Phillip Loubser found he had no choice but to rule that she was unlawfully extradited and his court had no right to try her.

Prosecutor in the asbestos tender case, Johan de Nysschen, told the Constitutional Court that this judgment ‘is based on the wrong legal principles, bad in law and a grave miscarriage of justice’, according to News24.

He said the state was pursuing its application for direct access to challenge Loubser’s decision urgently because the case against the R255m asbestos tender accused – including Magashule and tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi – has been postponed until 26 January 2026.

By that time, he contends, if the NPA’s submissions on Loubser’s ruling were correct, Cholota ’will again be required to be charged as an accused and to stand trial together with her 17 co-accused in the Free State High Court (Bloemfontein)’.

While stating that a date for its hearing of the Cholota and Schultz challenges would be set down ‘in due course’, Chief Justice Mandisa Maya has asked Free State DPP Navilla Somaru and the NPA to file only the most pertinent parts of the court record in both cases – and gave the parties involved until the end of September to file their arguments.

Full News24 report