A lawyer representing US journalist Andrew Meldrum, who was expelled from Zimbabwe last week, on Friday said she was pursuing efforts to allow him to return to the country, where he had lived and worked for 23 years.
Lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa said she filed papers on the government of President Robert Mugabe this week, after it had defied a High Court order staying Meldrum’s deportation.
Zimbabwe’s immigration authorities put Meldrum on a plane to London last Friday night, despite the High Court order.
”Until they return him they will be in contempt of court,” Mtetwa said on Friday.
”We filed further papers in which we incorporated the fact that as long as they don’t produce him in court, they are in contempt of court,” she said.
Meldrum, who works for The Guardian daily and its sister weekly paper, The Observer, was based in Zimbabwe for 23 years and had been granted residency in the southern African country.
Immigration officials last week declared him a prohibited immigrant.
Last year Meldrum was served with a deportation order moments after a magistrate court acquitted him on charges of publishing a false story, brought under a controversial media law enacted by Mugabe after he was re-elected last year.
The High Court barred that deportation to give him time to challenge it in the Supreme Court.
He became the sixth foreign correspondent forced to leave Zimbabwe since 2001. – Sapa-AFP