Zimbabwe’s Challenge to the SADC Tribunal

It is hardly surprsing that the Zimbabwean government, or more correctly, one half of that government, is attacking the SADC Tribunal. After all the SADC Tribunal has ruled against Zimbabwe on its land policies. As the legal opinion of Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs, Patrick Chinamasa, was issued, several of the parties who had approached the SADC Tribunal seeking a vindictaion of their rights had their farms burnt down.

Seemingly, Zimbabwe would burn down the Tribunal too and the entire legal architecture that SADC has established. Its challenge has repurcussions not only for Zimbabwean victims who would seek to have their rights vindicated befor the Tribunal but for all those in the region who would do so. Zimbabwe alleges that the Tribunal was established in violation of international law and accordingly has no jurisdiction in respect fo any matter.

As SALC argues in this opinion those arguments have no merit.

Zambia HIV Military Discrimination Case in the News

Check out the Washington Post’s coverage of our case involving the discrimination of two former employees of the Zambian Air Force.  The article does a good job of covering the main issues in the case.  The case is expected to go to trial 6 October.

SALC’s Prisons Project

JOAO SILVA for The New York Times

At present SALC is supporting initiatives aimed at improving prisoners’ rights and prison conditions in Malawi. As you’ll know from our blog, Malawi’s Constitutional Court recently handed down the Evance Moyo judgement, pertaining to juvenile prisoners’ rights. Chichiri Prison in Blantyre is where Evance was imprisoned and is representative of the conditions about which we’re concerned – countless detainees are kept for years without any prospect of trial and the health and wellbeing of prisoners is seriously endangered. Here, Richard Brigden, SALC’s consultant in Malawi, describes those conditions from close-up.

Evance Moyo v The Attorney General

Evance Moyo v the Attorney General of Malawi is available for download here

The SADC Summit and the Generals’ Report on Zimbabwe

The 29th Ordinary SADC Summit is to take place next week in Kinshasha, DRC. Zimbabwe is again likely to be on the agenda. With reports of an upsurge in political violence in Zimbabwe, SADC leaders, taking their obligation to promote peace and security in the region seriously, should be looking to devise a system by which such acts can be systematically addressed, condemned and countered.

Of course, doing so would require them to look comprehensively at the pattern of violence which has played out over recent years, specifically in the aftermath of the March elections of 2008, and key to such an assessment would be consideration of the Generals Report on post-election violence commissioned by then president Mbeki in his role as SADC-appointed facilitator of political dialogue in Zimbabwe.

Evance Moyo Judgement Handed Down in Malawi

Remand cell in Maula prison, Malawi Photo: Joao Silva, New York Times, 2005

We’ve been waiting for some time for the Malawian Constitutional Court to hand down judgement in the Evance Moyo matter. Yesterday it did.

Evance Moyo was arrested and detained in 1997, when he was only 16, accused of murder. Malawi’s law provides that juveniles, sentenced for homicide crimes, are sentenced at “the pleasure of the President”. But while Mr Moyo should have been sent to an approved school, where a “board of visitors” would have assessed his progress and made recommendations as to his continued detention, he was, in fact sent, to Chichiri prison – notorious for its overcrowding and appalling conditions. His entire period of detention and imprisonment has not seen him separated from adult inmates, as is required under international law.

The SALC Blog moving to our new and improved website. From now on you can find us blogging about hot human rights and legal issues in the region here. We hope you continue to visit us and share your comments and insights.

Selective Justice: Israel & Sudan?

I thought the letter below, published in Business Day today, so interesting, because in substance it is exactly the same argument being marshalled by Omar-al-Bashir of Sudan and his supporters against the International Criminal Court and its indictment of him — essentially, that the court pursues a vendetta against Sudan and its leadership, that it is anti-African, etc.

But if the supporters of Israel’s leadership and those of Sudan’s leadership each believe that they are uniquely being persecuted through the architecture of the international human rights system, there may be no surer sign that they aren’t.

Congo’s Rape Scourge

Ahead of Hillary Clinton’s vist to the Congo, the NYT and Washington Post published articles on the ever increasing levels of sexual violence in the Congo: the NYT focusing of the increased incidence of male rape and the Post looking at the extent to which Congo’s official army is contributing to this tragedy.
The numbers of rapes perpetrated, the ubiquitous manner in which they’re committed, clearly speak to the fact that crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Congo. But these types of categorisations — the enormity they encompass — often numb us to the individual experience and just how horrendous that is.

From the Post:

As women here do most mornings, Madelena Ngalya left the village around 9 a.m. one recent day and walked alone along a path through the jungle to her farm. The 56-year-old widow had been planting there for about an hour when she saw a soldier at the edge of the field. He walked toward her.
“I started trembling when I saw him,” she said. “I felt unable to cry, even to scream. I said, ‘My son, how are you?’”
The soldier asked whether she was by herself.
“I said, ‘I’m alone here,’ she said. “He said, ‘If you cry, we have many soldiers in the jungle, and when others hear you cry, they will come to you, too.’ My body was like dead. Then he did what he wanted to do.”

And from the NYT:

Tupapo Mukuli . . . said he was pinned down on his stomach and gang-raped in his cassava patch seven months ago. Mr. Mukuli is now the lone man in the rape ward at Panzi hospital, which is filled with hundreds of women recovering from rape-related injuries. Many knit clothes and weave baskets to make a little money while their bodies heal.
But Mr. Mukuli is left out.
“I don’t know how to make baskets,” he said. So he spends his days sitting on a bench, by himself.
. . .
[I]n a place where homosexuality is so taboo, the rapes carry an extra dose of shame.
“I’m laughed at,” Mr. Mukuli said. “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’ ”

Case postponed once again

This morning we learned that the judge in the case has decided to attend an international conference and thus has chosen to postpone the case until October.  This decision to postpone for an international conference comes amid a battle between the judiciary and a handful of lawyers calling for them to be more accountable in the press.  This does not seem to be a battle that should necessarily be fought in the press but it maqy point to a need for greater internal accountability in the justice system to ensure that litigants are according access to justice without unnecessary delays.