An in-depth Study on the impacts of Operation Murambatsvina One area remains poorly understood however, and this is any information about the numbers of people who had valid permits for trading, or valid rights to the property that they owned. Here a number of court actions have been mounted, and, to date, most seem to have failed. However, two decisions are important, as they suggest that citizens’ rights have been disregarded. In the first case, Justice Cheda of the Bulawayo High Court ruled that the conduct of the ZRP in destroying shacks and buildings, and in confiscating goods from vendors, was unlawful. As he commentedxxix: "This conduct on the part of the police was unlawful. Police are empowered to enforce the law but can only do so within the confines of the law and not outside it. The indiscriminate and wanton destruction as described by applicant and not denied by first and second respondents cannot be allowed." An even more recent case, dealing with continued evictions, resulted in Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights obtaining an uncontested injunction preventing 400 families from being evicted from the high-density suburb of Mbarexxx. This case raises again the question of the precipitate nature of Operation Murambatsvina, and the issue of whether most people may have been able to obtain legal relief from eviction or destruction of their propertiesxxxi. Useful as the small number of court actions are in understanding the limits of legality for both Government and citizens, they cannot give any impression of scale. As was noted in the second ActionAid International report, very high numbers reported losses: • • Property: Forty eight percent (48%) of households visited reported that they had incurred losses of property. Source of income: Overall, 76% of interviewed households reported that they had lost their sources of income. This figure is similar to the 73% that had lost primary sources of income (livelihoods) as a direct result of the Operation. The increase may be attributable to multiple sources of income that households are engaged in to ameliorate vulnerability. Strikingly, this generally affected all households in the same proportion. The pressing issue, and one related to some of the conclusions in the report of the UN Special Envoy, is the number within this overall total that had valid rights to practice their business or occupy the property that they lived or worked in. This clearly deserved further investigation. 2.4 Losses Linked to the issue of legal rights is the issue of losses incurred by those affected by the Operation. In the two previous reports by ActionAid International, attempts were made to estimate the losses incurred by the victims of Operation Murambatsvina. The second report estimated that Z$488,534,000.00 [US$29.5 million] were lost as a direct result of the Operation, but this did not include any data from Harare, which had been surveyed first and where no data relating to economic losses was collected. The interviewees indicated that they had sustained appreciable losses in the following areas: 10