HARARE – The Judicial Service Commission (JSC) on Wednesday caved in to pressure from judges and lawyers by cancelling a planned “training” programme organised by the presidency, and which would have been addressed by the principal of Zanu PF’s Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology and the Central Intelligence Organisation boss.
The volte-face came after lawyers gave notice of a plan to march in defence of judicial independence, and a legal challenge was about to be filed at the High Court.
The workshop had been organised ostensibly to train judges on the Integrated Results-Based Management (IRBM) system, which is used to measure performance across the civil service. Judges are not civil servants.
The speakers list included President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s chief secretary Martin Rushwaya, CIO director general Fulton Mangwanya, treasury secretary George Guvamatanga and most controversially Ishmael Mada, the principal of Zanu PF’s Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology.
Judges were reported to be “feeling violated” at a directive by Chief Justice Luke Malaba that they must all attend, while lawyers across the country mobilised to stop the event which was due to be held at the Rainbow Towers Hotel on July 4 and 5.
On Wednesday, the JSC said the event had been cancelled to allow further engagement on “the most appropriate programme, training material and resource persons” to train judges.
The JSC said it would device “programme content administered by the judiciary and suitable to the requirement for judicial independence.”
The admission by the JSC that the original programme was not appropriate nor suitable for the requirements of judicial independence has raised questions about how it was approved in the first place.
Lawyers Tendai Biti and Jeremiah Bamu were heading to the High Court on an urgent basis to ask a judge to stop the programme when the JSC abruptly cancelled the event.
Prominent lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa, who had given a “courtesy notice” to the police of their intended march to deliver a petition to Malaba said she received a call from police informing her that now that the JSC had cancelled the training, their march would no longer be necessary.
Biti and Bamu were going to tell the High Court that “having perused the notice (of judges training) it became apparent that this was not a training on the law conducted by impartial experts but was training to be conducted by inter alia partisan actors who are not legal experts and are prohibited from influencing judges,” according to prepared documents seen by ZimLive.
The lawyers were going to argue that as the training was to be conducted by members of the executive, this was a violation of the separation of powers principle as enshrined in the constitution.
If the High Court did not urgently intervene, they warned, “the judiciary’s impartiality and independence will be irreparably damaged with the effect that not only will the public lose confidence with the judiciary, but the judiciary may lose its credibility as an independent and impartial arbiter of disputes.”
The Catholic Lawyers Guild in Zimbabwe had also denounced the planned training, saying in a statement that it “appears to be outside contemporary, salient, established legal and judicial principles in Zimbabwe and the region.”
“Subjecting judges who must at all times be independent and be seen to be independent to an ideology of one party to the exclusion of others not only compromises the judiciary but attacks its independence and impartiality. We note that this is all happening at a time when the public confidence in the judiciary is low, given the widely held public perception that the judiciary is captured by the executive,” the Catholic lawyers said in a statement.
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