ZELDA VENTER
The Gauteng High Court, Pretoria will today (Wednesday) rule on whether or not it will hear the merits of the case concerning the publishing of next week’s 2024 matric results in the media.
The Information Regulator (IR) turned to court on an urgent basis to interdict the Department of Basic Education (DBE) from publishing the 2024 matric results in the media.
It maintained that before the department has obtained the go-ahead from the students that their results may be published, the department must issue the results via its SMS line or the learners can fetch it at the schools where they wrote the exams.
The IR has to first cross the hurdle of whether their application is urgent or not. Judge Ronel Tolmay on Tuesday made it clear that she would at this stage only hear arguments regarding the urgency of the case.
She refused to, for now, entertain arguments regarding the merits of the application.
If the judge ruled the matter not to be urgent, it would follow that the results will be published next week. If she ruled in favour of the IR - that it is urgent - all the parties involved will proceed to present their arguments on the facts of the case.
The IR argued that the matter was urgent because as things now stand, it will be a violation of learners' right to the protection of personal information if the department went ahead to publish the results.
According to the IR, until the department has consent from the learners to publish their results, the department should be barred from doing so. It maintained that the department should only issue the results via its SMS line and that learners can also obtain their results from the schools where they wrote the exams.