IRIN Focus on threats to the judiciary

Recent intimidation of Zimbabwe’s top judges coupled with government’s growing tendency to ignore their rulings spells disaster for the country, observers told IRIN on Monday. “The judiciary is being battered into becoming a compliant arm of the executive,” Douglas Mwonzora of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), an umbrella organisation campaigning for constitutional change, told IRIN. After issuing verdicts in favour of white commercial farmers, the judiciary has incurred the wrath of the government and so-called “war veterans” who want judges out of office for alleged racism. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa has said the judiciary has placed itself on a collision course with other arms of government and earned itself the “notoriety that it constitutes the main opposition to the ruling party.” Following a series of verdicts last year against the government’s controversial land reforms, the judiciary has come under persistent fire and even threats of physical harm from war veterans who have told them to resign or be forced out of office. Composed of two white judges, two black judges and one Indian judge, the Supreme Court has been accused of racism and bias. The accusations over the past year have degenerated into anger, leading to war veterans invading and disrupting a Supreme Court session and issuing threats of violence to the judges if they do not resign. “We must begin to exorcise from all our institutions the racist ghost of (former Rhodesian leader) Ian Smith and we do so by phasing out his disciples and sympathisers,” said the justice minister. But the Supreme Court judges have not taken the barrage of criticism lying down. They’ve hit back at government saying that it is breaking its own laws. “It’s absurd that the government is now crying foul over its own laws. It is parliament itself, dominated by ZANU-PF, that made the laws regarding the procedure for land acquisition. Yet the same government is not following its laws in acquiring land,” said Mwonzora. Observers say that the government’s “fast-track” land acquisition programme is illegal because it does not supply farmers with sufficient notice, the right to appeal or compensation as laid down in the 1995 act. The country’s top courts have ruled against the current land-grab on three occasions, but there has been no let-up in the occupation of white-owned commercial farms. “We’ve only broken one teeny-tiny law and that’s the law of trespass,” presidential spokesman George Charamba told IRIN. He added that: “We’re not going to let that law get in the way of us fulfilling our historical destiny as Zimbabweans.” But a top Harare attorney said that the government has not only broken its own laws, but was clearly acting in breach of the constitution. “Section 16 of the constitution guarantees property rights, these are being violated in Zimbabwe every day by government-sanctioned land invaders,” he said. The relationship between the judiciary and President Robert Mugabe’s government deteriorated further on 18 January when a cabinet minister accused the country’s most senior judge of “kangaroo” justice after he censured another judge regarded as a key Mugabe appointee. Jonathan Moyo, the minister of information, launched a vitriolic attack on supreme court Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay, one of the most highly regarded judges in the Commonwealth. Moyo said Gubbay’s rebuke on Wednesday to the head of the high court, Judge-President Godfrey Chidyausiku, “smacks of a kangaroo type of reprimand”. A week earlier Chidyausiku stunned lawyers when he accused British-born Gubbay of “promising” white farmers that “victory in the courts was assured” for them in their battle against the government. Delivering the formal speech to open the new high-court session, Chidyausiku also attacked the Supreme Court because, in November, it overturned his own judgment setting aside an earlier Supreme Court ruling against state-organised land seizures. Chidyausiku also accused other judges of obstructing Mugabe’s political campaign to hinder the president’s “revolutionary land programme”. Then, in an unprecedented move, Gubbay hit back, saying Chidyausiku had made “an astonishing and quite unwarranted attack” on him and the other judges who had delivered judgments against the government on the land issue. He pointed out that in each case, the government’s own lawyers had agreed with attorneys for white farmers that “their position was legally indefensible”. Last week the constant pressure on judges began to tell. On Monday they met the government to discuss how it can protect them from threats from the war veterans. Two of the country’s five Supreme Court judges - Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay and Justice Wilson Sandura - met Vice President Simon Muzenda to see if the executive could persuade the war veterans to stop intimidating them. “We heard their case and we’ll be working to protect the judges,” said Charmaba. But he added that the war veterans were not part of government and that he could not offer any gaurantees of safety to members of the judiciary. With the executive and judiciary at loggerheads, eyebrows are being raised abroad. Last week, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Dato’ Param Cumaraswamy, expressed grave concern over threats to the independence of the judiciary. “The deterioration in the rule of law and the undermining of the independence of the judiciary is a matter of grave concern to the international community,” Cumaraswamy said. He drew the Zimbabwean government’s attention to Principle 2 of the United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary which obliges the judiciary to decide matters before them impartially. Some observers say that the government is now choosing to disregard any land that it disagrees with. “The Supreme Court recently upheld the eviction of 25 families from a farm in Mashonaland, but the government told them to stay on,” Mwonzora said. “I had a labour dispute, some workers were lawfully dismissed, but the Ministry of Labour then intervened and ordered them to be reinstated,” a top attorney said. According to Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), this wholesale disregard for the law by the executive is undermining the very fabric of society. “Zimbabwe is headed for chaos and the law of the jungle unless the independence of the judiciary can be rapidly re-asserted,” LHR’s spokesman Tawana Hondoro said.