Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) SADC leaders discuss legality of Tribunal

SADC leaders discuss legality of Tribunal
by Staff Reporter
16/08/2010 00:00:00

ZIMBABWE will call for the nullification and voidance of rulings made by the Southern African Development Community’s Tribunal at the two-day summit of regional heads of state which opened in Namibia on Monday.

SADC leaders will discuss the legality of the Tribunal – an issue first raised at the trade bloc’s summit in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. Justice ministers from the 15 SADC countries were tasked to look into the issue and report back to the heads of state this week.

Discussions on the Tribunal were triggered by displaced white Zimbabwean commercial farmers who won a ruling stopping the government from seizing their farms – despite the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe ruling against them.

Zimbabwe rejected the tribunal ruling, claiming it was "null and void" as two-thirds of SADC members required to ratify the protocol creating the court had not done so yet. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said this week that the country, by signing up to the protocol establishing the Tribunal, had never intended it to overrule its courts.

He said: “I think there is a re-awakening to the fact that a monster was created without full appreciation of what was intended.

“'Which issues do we want the Tribunal to be seized with? Do we want it to overrule and overturn the judgements of our Supreme Courts, which basically this Tribunal is doing?

“The Tribunal cannot act like a court of appeal as this was never its intended purpose. They cannot be overruling the judgements of our Supreme Courts; we have not given them that power.”

Zimbabwe will propose a renegotiation of the court’s jurisdiction, Chinamasa said, and this could mean amending the Treaty or come up with a completely new protocol.

More importantly, Zimbabwe wants the tribunal’s decisions made thus far declared null and void.

Chinamasa revealed: “The point is basically that the protocol giving the Tribunal powers was not ratified, and up to now only five of the 15 countries have ratified it.

“We are saying now you cannot uphold a mistake at the expense of a member country. We have made it clear we are not bound, the SADC Tribunal can issue as many judgements as it wants, we will not (abide) ... we are not going to reverse our land reform, because the impact of these judgements is basically to return 11 million hectares of land to the 4,000 white farmers which we have already distributed to 350,000 people, it does not make any sense anyway in public policy.”

Writing in the state-run Herald newspaper last Saturday, President Robert Mugabe's spokesman George Charamba said the Tribunal was a "decided illegality".

He said: "Zimbabwe will be on the offensive, in respect of the so-called SADC Tribunal, itself a decided illegality which the Executive Secretary should have simply stopped a long time ago. The petitions by white-led Bar associations shall come to a humorous stop, too abrupt for any comfort."

Labels: AFRIFORUM, DRC, LAND RIGHTS, SADC

posted by MrK @ 2:03 AM