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Zimbabwe: Farmers Challenge Land Seizure At Regional Court
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Namibia Economist (Windhoek)
18 July 2008
Posted to the web 18 July 2008
Rodrick Mukumbira
Windhoek
A 10-person tribunal of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), sitting in Windhoek, had began this week to hear a petition by 78 Zimbabwean white commercial farmers to have government's controversial farm eviction laws overturned.
The initiator of the case, Michael Campbell, 73, was however not at the hearing that was sitting at the Supreme Court, as he was still recovering from the injuries sustained on June 29 when militia loyal to Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF abducted him, his wife Angela, 66, and his son-in-law Ben Freeth, 38.
His lawyers said the trio had been taken to a militia camp where they were severely beaten for hours before being forced to sign a blank page stating they would not go to the SADC Tribunal.
Initially Campbell, a commercial farmer in Zimbabwe's Chegutu area, 100km west of the capital, Harare, brought the case on behalf of himself, his employees and their families who live and work on the farm to stop the Mugabe government from seizing his farm without compensation.
This case was first heard in December 2007 with the tribunal ruling that the farmer could not be evicted pending finalisation of his case. Since then, 77 other farmers have since joined Campbell.
This week, his son-in-law Freeth was at the court, his head covered in bandages and being in a wheelchair, as lawyers of the Zimbabwe government argued that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the case.
Campbell and the other farmers are now challenging a law introduced last year that denies farmers threatened with eviction the right to appeal.
Zimbabwe is a signatory to the treaty setting up the SADC Tribunal, which can hear appeals from any of regional bloc's 14 members on the provisions of its founding treaty, including the rule of law.
However Advocate Prince Machaya, presenting the Zimbabwe government, argued before the tribunal that it was not correct to say that all matters agreed on by SADC member states gave rise to legal obligations.
"The SADC Heads of State provided a remedy in the event that a member state does not conform and it is up to them to arrogate penalties which they could mete out to member states that do not conform. The SADC Treaty merely outlines and sets out frameworks within which binding obligations can then be created for purposes of their being enforced," Machaya told the tribunal.
Machaya told the tribunal that land reform in Zimbabwe was inevitable. He said the white farming community of 4 000 people occupied just fewer than 50 percent of all the fertile farming land whilst about 12 million people occupied land in areas of low rainfall and poor soils. He said the expropriation of farms could only be challenged if it was being done with bad motives such as "if a minister takes a farm to allocate to a girlfriend, then the expropriation can be challenged through judicial review."
He also said the law Zimbabwe introduced last year was not in contravention of its SADC Treaty that formed the tribunal and called on the court to refer the case to the SADC Summit of Head of States as "it cannot legislate on the government to nullify such legislation".
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Zimbabwe embarked on a chaotic and often violent land reform programme in 2000, which saw about 4 000 white commercial farmers being booted out of prime farming land. Critics say the programme has helped turn the nation from a regional breadbasket into a begging bowl, while the government argues that the programme is meant to benefit the country's black majority.
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