The Zimbabwe-born son of Hungarian refugees on Wednesday won the right to challenge President Robert Mugabe’s draconian new citizenship laws which threaten to leave two million Zimbabweans stateless.
Leslie Leventhe Petho (42) a Harare-based businessman, won his appeal in the Supreme Court against a ban on a class action lawsuit on behalf of the children of immigrants who have been refused Zimbabwean passports on the grounds they may secretly hold an illegal second citizenship, inherited through their parents.
Supreme Court judge Wilson Sandura overruled an earlier High Court ban on Petho’s case, for which he needed special permission under newly-enacted Zimbabwean law.
Sandura directed Petho, whose case is backed by the Legal Resources Foundation, a civic lobby group, to advertise his legal action so people in the same situation would be aware of the likely impact on their rights.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear Petho’s case — he is campaigning to have his Zimbabwean passport and citizenship restored — within the next six months, setting a precedent for Zimbabweans of Malawian, Mozambican, Indian, South African and British descent, who have been turned away by registrar-general Tobaiwa Mudede.
Legal sources say over two-million people may be affected by Mugabe’s move to strip Zimbabweans with foreign-born parents of their automatic right to citizenship. He has claimed foreign-funded opponents, particularly Tony Blair’s labour government, were behind rising discontent in the country.
Dual citizenship is already banned, but Mugabe claimed white critics of his regime were secretly flouting the prohibition. Petho, whose parents fled the 1956 Hungarian uprising, was born in Zimbabwe in 1960.
He was told by the Hungarian embassy in Pretoria that he could only obtain legal proof he had no claim to Hungarian citizenship by successfully applying for it and then completing renunciation procedures.
However, the act of applying for foreign citizenship, whether successful or not, would irrevocably strip him of Zimbabwean citizenship under Mugabe’s new law. He said he was pleased with his court success. ”I think I did the right thing to find out what my rights were and stand up for them in court,” he said.
A US State Department Human Rights report alleges there is rampant corruption in Zimbabwe’s passport office, with bribes frequently required as a precondition for granting passports and proof of citizenship. – Sapa-DPA