A regional tribunal ruled Friday that 78 white Zimbabweans can keep their farms because the government’s land-reform scheme discriminated against them, in a key test of the new court’s influence.
Judge Luis Mondlane, president of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) tribunal, said that Zimbabwe had violated the treaty governing the 15-nation regional bloc by trying to seize the white-owned farms.
The Zimbabwean government “is in breach of the SADC treaty with regards to discrimination”, Mondlane said.
Three of the 78 farmers have already been forced from their land, and the court ruled that Zimbabwe had also violated the treaty by failing to pay them fair compensation, he said.
The verdict is the first major ruling by the court since it first convened in April last year, and Zimbabwe did not immediately say if it would comply.
Zimbabwe’s ambassador to Namibia, Chipo Zindoga, said the government did not yet have a formal response to the ruling, but warned the verdict could interfere in the country’s controversial land reforms.
Eight years ago Zimbabwe began seizing white-owned farms to resettle them with landless black Zimbabweans, but the chaotic programme was plagued by deadly violence and some farms ended up in the hands of cronies of President Robert Mugabe.
“The resettled farmers will be perplexed and alarmed that this ruling will interfere with the land reform,” Zindoga said.
The group of white farmers was led by William Michael Campbell, who filed the case last December to seek court relief “from a continued onslaught of invasions and intimidation”, according to court papers.
The SADC tribunal was created as part of a peer-review mechanism within the organisation. It aims to ensure the objectives of SADC’s founding treaty, including human rights and property rights, are upheld. — AFP