Opinion / Columnist
Mtetwa says judges are clueless on Copac constitution - which is itself a tyrant's gangue!
08 Mar 2015 at 17:34hrs | Views
LEADING human rights lawyer, Beatrice Mtetwa, has said that local judges do not understand the country's new constitution in a development that is affecting the full enjoyment of citizens' rights.
She added: "There should be special understanding of those provisions by ensuring that the judicial services commission gets judges, particularly in the family court, to understand that rights are there to be enjoyed not just to say we have a constitution which says there are these rights."
Zimbabwe has been chaining out professionals who really have no clue what they are doing be they engineers, doctors, journalist or whatever. The deputy minister of tertiary educated admitted a few weeks ago that our graduates are "half-baked". It is therefore not surprising that our problem of "half-baked" includes judges who too have no clue of the law they are administering.
How can there be justice in a system where those task to administer justice do not know the law!
We need to revamp our whole education system right from grade one to University level.
Indeed we should not just stop with the judges, when it comes to the country's constitution but take it further; to those who write the laws, parliament. The poor judges are being asked to make sense of a constitution that does not make sense; to delivery human rights and justice when the constitution itself does not have these values in the first place.
The Copac constitution was supposed to be a democratic constitution according to the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed by Zimbabwe's three political parties in the 2008 to 2013 Government of National Unity (GNU) and SADC the guarantor of the agreement. It is not the democratic constitution the nation had been promised but instead a tyrant's gangue.
Tsvangirai and his MDC friend claimed the Copac constitution would deliver free and fair elections, the single most important basic human right the new constitution especially asked to delivery. As we know and was so blatantly rub in on 31 July 2013, elections day, it did not do any such thing.
Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana, the Zanu PF MP and co-chairman on the parliamentary committee task to write the new Copac constitution later boosted that it was Mugabe who "dictated" the new constitution. It was a tyrant's gangue and not even an "MDC child" as Tsvangirai had claimed!
We need to revisit the GPA and get all the democratic reforms implemented, MDC failed to get even one reform implemented during all their five years in the GNU, and to clean up the weaknesses in the Copac constitution if are serious about everyone enjoying all their democratic rights and freedoms in Zimbabwe.
She added: "There should be special understanding of those provisions by ensuring that the judicial services commission gets judges, particularly in the family court, to understand that rights are there to be enjoyed not just to say we have a constitution which says there are these rights."
Zimbabwe has been chaining out professionals who really have no clue what they are doing be they engineers, doctors, journalist or whatever. The deputy minister of tertiary educated admitted a few weeks ago that our graduates are "half-baked". It is therefore not surprising that our problem of "half-baked" includes judges who too have no clue of the law they are administering.
How can there be justice in a system where those task to administer justice do not know the law!
We need to revamp our whole education system right from grade one to University level.
Indeed we should not just stop with the judges, when it comes to the country's constitution but take it further; to those who write the laws, parliament. The poor judges are being asked to make sense of a constitution that does not make sense; to delivery human rights and justice when the constitution itself does not have these values in the first place.
The Copac constitution was supposed to be a democratic constitution according to the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed by Zimbabwe's three political parties in the 2008 to 2013 Government of National Unity (GNU) and SADC the guarantor of the agreement. It is not the democratic constitution the nation had been promised but instead a tyrant's gangue.
Tsvangirai and his MDC friend claimed the Copac constitution would deliver free and fair elections, the single most important basic human right the new constitution especially asked to delivery. As we know and was so blatantly rub in on 31 July 2013, elections day, it did not do any such thing.
Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana, the Zanu PF MP and co-chairman on the parliamentary committee task to write the new Copac constitution later boosted that it was Mugabe who "dictated" the new constitution. It was a tyrant's gangue and not even an "MDC child" as Tsvangirai had claimed!
We need to revisit the GPA and get all the democratic reforms implemented, MDC failed to get even one reform implemented during all their five years in the GNU, and to clean up the weaknesses in the Copac constitution if are serious about everyone enjoying all their democratic rights and freedoms in Zimbabwe.
Source - Wilbert Mukori
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