Judgment No. SC 13/18 Civil Appeal No. SC 469/13 Ref. HC 601/11 Ref. HC 9527/11 (a) an offer letter; or (b) a permit; or (c) a land settlement lease. It is common cause that both appellants have no lawful authority in the form of an Offer Letter, permit or land settlement lease authorising them to occupy and use the disputed land. Their plea is for the acquiring authority to strip the first respondent of his rights acquired in terms of his Offer Letter and confer them on the first appellant. They argue that the first appellant is an indigenous person and it is not government policy to dispossess one indigenous person of land in order to give it to another. This Court has already determined that the court a quo correctly nullified Cecil Michael Reimer’s ownership of the disputed land. It also correctly held that ownership of the disputed land still vests in the second respondent. That being the case, the courts cannot protect the appellant on the basis that the disputed land is owned or occupied by an indigenous person. Although the first appellant is in occupation of the gazetted land and the second appellant occupies it through a lease agreement, the occupation is unlawful. As already determined elsewhere in this judgment the law and the courts cannot protect an illegality regardless of the colour, nationality or race of the perpetrator. This should really be the answer to the appellants’ argument in this respect, but for the sake of completeness, there is need to look at the argument from a different perspective. For that purpose I consider it necessary to determine whether the first appellant being a juristic 13