The Daily News wins again

The Daily News, Zimbabwe's banned privately-owned newspaper, on Friday won a legal order compelling the police to vacate the newspaper's premises and stop interfering with its operations. The urgent application was lodged with the High Court on Monday after police had occupied the newspaper's offices in central Harare and its printing factory on 19 December. This was despite the fact that the newspaper's publishers, the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), had just won another legal victory, allowing them to continue publishing while the issue of its registration was being fought in the courts. Judge Tendai Uchena on Friday said the police legal representative, Fatima Maxwell, was trying to defend the "indefensible". Maxwell concurred that her clients had "misdirected themselves" by occupying the newspaper's premises and preventing publication, despite court orders allowing the largest circulating newspaper to resume operations. In their affidavit the police argued that they had a "constitutional obligation" to prevent the newspaper from being published, based on a complaint by the Media and Information Commission (MIC) which had refused to grant the pro-opposition daily a publishing license. The Daily News and its sister newspaper, The Daily News on Sunday, were first closed in September last year after the Supreme Court said it could only entertain the ANZ's constitutional challenge to Zimbabwe's media laws if it was registered with the MIC, which is supposed to regulate media operations. Heavily-armed police moved in and closed the newspaper, saying its operations were illegal. But the ANZ went on to register victories in three challenges in the High Court and Administrative Court, which were all ignored by the authorities. "We have won all our legal battles. For now we are going to publish. But we don't know what the authorities may do, as they have been wilfully ignoring court rulings," ANZ chief executive officer, Sam Sipepa Nkomo, was quoted as saying.