A UN official responsible for monitoring basic legal freedoms has denounced threats made against judges and their families in Zimbabwe. “Harassment, intimidation, attacks, and threats against an independent judiciary and its judges will in fact be seen as direct assault on the rule of law,” said Dato’Param Cumaraswamy, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers. “If these further threats and intimidation are true, then the earlier assertion of the government on 12 February 2001 that ‘the judiciary is alive and thriving in Zimbabwe’ cannot possibly be sustained.” – AFP