[It is good to see the White Farmers fighting tooth and nail through every legal avenue available to them. They will of course lose, but then again, they are standing up for a principle. Farmers in S.Africa and Nambia will be faced with a similar problem. But, it is good to follow the process so that it can be shown, how utterly racist and vindictive the Government of Zimbabwe really is. It will damage that country for a very long time, and the evil actions against the farmers will rebound on that evil Government for a very long time. Jan]

Harare – Zimbabwean lawyers on Friday braced for a fight with the state over proposed constitutional changes aimed at barring white farmers from challenging land grabs in court and preventing people deemed anti-government from going overseas.

“We intend to challenge the passage of this evil piece of legislation in all manners and through all channels available to us,” at least 100 lawyers said in a petition to judges and lawmakers.

“As officers of the court with a duty to the law, we cannot sit back and fail to act while fundamental rights accruing to people are being attacked.”

The lawyers said they plan to march next Thursday to hand over their petition to parliament and the Supreme Court.

‘If we don’t get the clearance, we will appeal to the High Court’
“We have applied to the police for permission to hold the march but we have not had a response,” lawyer Wozani Moyo said.

“If we don’t get the clearance, we will appeal to the High Court.”

The Zimbabwean government last month published proposed constitutional reforms which will allow the state to assume ownership of farms immediately after a property has been officially listed for expropriation.

This will make it impossible for white farmers to seek legal redress.

“The amendment effectively usurps the authority of the courts by denying people recourse to the law challenging state action which violates fundamental human rights,” the lawyers said.

The reforms will also allow the government to confiscate passports and impose travel bans on people who it thinks pose a risk to the “national, public and economic interests of the state.”

If passed into law, the reforms will also provide for the re-introduction of a two-chamber parliament which critics say is meant to accommodate members of the governing party who lost in the March parliamentary elections.

Zimbabwe’s land reforms, which began, often violently, in 2000 after the rejection in a referendum of a government-sponsored draft constitution, have seen about 4 000 white farmers evicted from their properties.

The land has been redistributed to landless blacks in a move that the government has said is designed to correct imbalances created by colonial rule, when the majority of prime farmland was owned by about 4 500 whites.

Thousands of former white commercial farmers are challenging the seizure of their properties without compensation. – Sapa-AFP

Source: Independent Online (IOL)
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>