Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Enforcing the Rule of Law in Zimbabwe application. Most of its provisions clearly breached the 1980 Constitution. It was not the only obnoxious law on the books, just the most tyrannical. Suspending for five years the enforcement by the courts of the Declaration of Rights gave Zimbabwe’s new, Independent Parliament breathing space to clean up the statute book and repeal laws, like LOMA, which breached the Constitution. It did not do so. In 2001, LOMA, amnesties and other legal breaches of human rights are still valid in a Zimbabwe in which the rule of law is increasingly insecure. What Parliament did not do, though, the Supreme Court started. When the Declaration of Rights came into force in 1985, complainants started coming before the courts. The courts overturned, section by section, those provisions of LOMA and other statutes which were unconstitutional. Although many unconstitutional provisions have not yet been tested before the courts, State monopolies over communication were invalidated and constitutional rights upheld. The courts were then repeatedly accused, by the executive, of making and changing the law. In fact, as we shall see later (in Chapter 3), it was the executive, not the judiciary, that interfered directly (through subordinate legislation) and indirectly (through the ruling party’s majority in Parliament) in law-making. The fourth Parliament passed what Internet Service Providers (ISPs) called the ‘draconian’ Posts and Telecommunications Act. It provides inter alia for the unconstitutional surveillance of electronic mail. On this controversial Bill as on earlier ones aimed at curtailing existing freedoms, there was no parliamentary debate. ISPs threatened constitutional action as soon as the President signed it into law, which he did on 16 June 2000. However, there have been no followup reports on whether such action was launched by those threatened, by their lack of Zimbabwean citizenship, with being deprived of their ISP licences. Popular disaffection with such legislative failure to protect our rights resulted, in the June 2000 elections, in opposition parties holding nearly half of the elected seats in our fifth Parliament. Even with 30 Parliamentary appointees, the ruling party no longer has the necessary majority to change the Constitution. That has not stopped it passing, on slender majorities with party whips in action, new bills which its legal advisors have told Parliament contain unconstitutional clauses. These have included most recently, in 2001, the Land Acquisition Amendment Act and the Broadcasting Services Act. The Land Acquisition Amendment Act (15/2000; Chapter 20:10) (LAAA) was unanimously rejected by Parliament’s Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement Portfolio Committee,1 It was passed in two days by 61 to 49 votes, and gazetted into law on 7 November 2000. It replaced the earlier Amendment gazetted using the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act, at a time when both were under constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court. The ruling party refused to accept that the LAAA was anti-constitutional, an attempt to pre-empt a Supreme Court ruling,2 or sub judice. The Speaker reported that the Parliamentary Legal Committee had given it a non- Parliamentary Debates 27,26:2710, 2713. Even while insisting that it would take retrospective effect from 23 May 2000 by incorporating the older provisions! (Parliamentary Debates 27,26:2752-61) 1 2 8