Page:Fourie v Minister of Home Affairs (SCA).djvu/24

Rh provision should be declared unconstitutionally narrow and the remedial process of ‘reading in’ adopted.

The majority in Daniels assigned a broad meaning to a word whose purport was not certain. It applied the constitutionally interpretative approach. This involved attributing a wide meaning to a word, without changing the word. The approach suggested by Farlam JA goes radically further. It does not assign a broad meaning to a contested word or phrase, but substitutes a phrase with an entirely different word. In the circumstances of this case I do not consider that this is permissible. Radically innovative statutory interpretations of this kind were devised, as the authority Farlam JA quotes shows, for jurisdictions which do not, or at the time did not, have the ample remedies of constitutionalism. Under our Constitution, the proper interpretative approach is plain. If statutory wording cannot reasonably bear the meaning that constitutional validity requires, then it must be declared invalid and the ‘reading in’ remedy adopted.