Call for inquiry into Sadc Tribunal

establish its real motives.

Addressing a workshop in Bulawayo this week on the role of Parliament in foreign policy, Justice Mubako described the tribunal as “a kangaroo court and a comedy”.
“In my opinion, an enquiry is called for to determine who was responsible (for its creation) and why,” Justice Mubako said.

“The prime suspects must be the officials of the Sadc secretariat who planned and orchestrated the judicial charade and the “judges” who seemed to lobby for upholding of their judgments even when it was plain that they were improperly constituted,” he added.

Justice Mubako is also former Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister and Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to the US.
Such tribunals, he said, were detrimental to the image of Africa and its people.

SADC TRIBUNAL

“The spectacle of a panel of learned dignitaries in judicial regalia presiding over a kangaroo court would be a hilarious comedy if the matter was not so serious.
“Detractors would be surely justified to say that only in Africa could such a farce or tragi-comedy happen,” he said.

Dr Mubako said it was sad to note that an officer from the Attorney General’s Office sat through the tribunal’s proceedings without objecting that Zimbabwe was not a member of that court.

“The officer may not have known of the absence of ratification. If so, it only goes to show that the conduct of foreign policy is often left to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, divorced from the rest of Government including Parliament and by extension the general public.

“Foreign Affairs is now too important a subject to be left to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs alone,” he said.
Justice Mubako added that the extra-ordinary Sadc summit held recently in Windhoek, Namibia, only decided “to pronounce obsequies on the illegitimate monster (Sadc tribunal)”.

“The summit simply dismantled the so-called tribunal but said nothing about what it had purported to do on Zimbabwe.
“Zimbabwe’s Minister of Justice, Patrick Chinamasa, would have wanted an explicit cancellation of the tribunal’s judgments.

“That might have satisfied Zimbabwe politically and diplomatically, but from a legal point of view it was hardly necessary.
“The judgments were dead nullities which were incurably void,” he said.

At its meeting in Namibia last month, the Sadc extraordinary summit decided to dissolve and reconstitute the Sadc tribunal with a new mandate.
The tribunal courted controversy when it passed judgments that contravened Zimbabwe’s constitutional position on the land reform programme.