A 65-year-old retired white Zimbabwean judge disappeared on Friday after being picked up by unknown police at his home before dawn, his lawyers said.
Fergus Blackie, who ordered the arrest of Zimbabwe’s Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa for contempt of court just before he retired in July, was taken from his home in central Harare at 4am, advocate Dipak Mehta said.
Mehta said he was planning an application to the High Court on Friday afternoon for an order to police to produce Blackie in court.
”He vanished after being picked up by some policemen, we don’t know who they were,” he said.
”I have been running around since this morning and still haven’t found where he is. We spoke to people at the law and order section, they claim ignorance. I have been to Harare central (police station) and was given the run around. I have been to police headquarters and to police special investigations and they claim to be ignorant.
”They are going to make things difficult and give us the run around until Monday and then deal with the matter, unless we can get something sorted out this afternoon,” he said.
Human rights lawyers said it was common practice among security police to arrest government critics on Friday mornings, keep them in police cells all weekend and bring them to court on Monday mornings.
Blackie was threatened with criminal proceedings by Chinamasa after he ordered police to arrest the ministers for failing to appear in court on charges of contempt.
The daily Herald newspaper reported on Friday that chief justice Godfrey Chidyausiku had issued police commissioner Augustine Chihuri with ”instructions to commence criminal investigations” against Blackie over a recent case involving a woman convicted in a lower court of theft from her employer.
It quoted Chidyausiku as saying Blackie’s conduct in the case was ”grossly irregular”.
The newspaper said Blackie had quashed the woman’s conviction, but had not consulted the other judge who sat with him in the case. However, no independent confirmation could be obtained.
Blackie has been a frequent target of the state propaganda press.
He took early retirement in July, five years before he was due to step down. One of his last rulings was to order the arrest of Chinamasa who had failed to appear before the court to answer charges of contempt of court.
The charges were brought by the country’s judiciary against Chinamasa after he denounced a ruling by an Asian High Court judge.
Chinamasa responded to Blackie’s arrest order by saying that the ruling was ”a hostile parting shot against the executive… which should not be tolerated”. Police did not carry out Blackie’s order.
Blackie was the seventh judge in 15 months to step down from the bench after issuing rulings that embarrassed President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Judge George Smith is the last white judge left. The first to go was internationally respected former chief justice Anthony Gubbay, who was forced to resign by the regime and threatened with violence by Mugabe’s ruling party militiamen.
The government accused him of being ”anti-government” because his court had declared Mugabe’s seizures of white-owned farms illegal and ordered police to evict squatters who had invaded the farms. The orders were ignored.
Since then, Mugabe has appointed other pro-government judges to the supreme court and left only one independent justice on the bench of five.
The International Bar Association, made up of former chief justices and leading advocates, has accused Mugabe of ”packing the court” with sympathisers to ensure favourable decisions.
Blackie served as a lawyer in the attorney-general’s department of the then Rhodesian government and in 1974 he was elected as an MP for the former ruling Rhodesian Front of former prime minister Ian Smith.
Four years later he became a junior judge who was promoted by Mugabe after independence in 1980.
In 1995 one of Mugabe’s ministers accused him of running a ”kangaroo court” because he held a night sitting in a police station to order police to release a group of white farmers held on allegations of illegal possession of weapons.
The government convened an inquiry into allegations of misconduct and he was cleared. ? Sapa-AFP