Feature - Rule of law crisis continues

Swaziland's highest judicial officer has resigned after being demoted as Chief Justice of the High Court earlier this week by a royal government he often angered with rulings the palace felt were contrary to its interests. "If government does not respect court rulings, why are we here?" Stanley Sapire asked the palace counsel, Attorney-General Phesheya Dlamini, in response to a crisis sparked by Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini's rejection of two Court of Appeal rulings. The prime minister in November said the government would not honour appeal court decisions ordering the jailing of the police commissioner for contempt of court, or challenging King Mswati III's right to rule by decree. In a terse statement on Wednesday, he announced Sapire's resignation. "The prime minister wouldn't say whether Sapire jumped or was pushed," a source in the Swaziland Law Society told IRIN. "Either way, [government] has been gunning for him since he freed [pro-democracy opposition leader] Mario Masuku at the end of Masuku's long sedition trial last year." Masuku, president of the banned political party the People's United Democratic Movement, felt Sapire's record on the bench was mixed. "The people of Macetjeni and Kwamkhweli villages were evicted at the king's orders because they would not accept the king's brother as their chief. The evictees were ordered back to their land by the Appeal Court, but they were blocked by the police. They came to Sapire with the appeal court ruling, and asked him to enforce it, but he refused. He said he had no jurisdiction." Masuku said this was followed by the controversial case of a mother who sued the palace last year for the return of her teenage daughter, who was taken from a schoolyard without the mother's knowledge or permission. The girl was sequestered in an unknown location until she became the tenth wife of King Mswati. "When he presided over that trial, Sapire was leaning toward the royal case, and we felt he was again going to say he had no jurisdiction over a matter of Swazi custom such as a king's marriage. But then government blundered. The attorney-general, the king's top palace advisor and others, went to Sapire's chambers, and they threatened to have him fired if he did not drop the case. In open court the next day, he said he would not give in to that demand. We all cheered him," Masuku said. But Sapire's defiance sealed his fate, according to legal observers. Sapire, a South African, was originally on good terms with long-serving Justice Minister Maweni Simelane, who was himself forced out of cabinet this week due to ill health. But internal and international pressure for political reform, placed on a traditional leadership intent on preserving sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarchy, allegedly made palace officials suspicious of outsiders. The local press reported that King Mswati felt foreigners wished to subvert Swazi culture, and he singled out the courts. Overturning the appeal court rulings, Prime Minister Dlamini said the magistrates were under the influence of foreign agendas. Angered by the charge, the full six-member Court of Appeal bench resigned. Since November, Swaziland has functioned without an appeal court. Hopes that a new justice minister, former natural resources minister Magwagwa Mdluli, would ease the rule of law crisis were dashed on Tuesday when Mdluli took a hard anti-judiciary line. He told the Swazi Senate in his first appearance as justice minister that the courts in his opinion were anti-government. This week, the International Bar Association (IBA) released a report on what the group described as Swaziland's collapsing judicial system. The report was based on the findings of an IBA team which toured the kingdom earlier this year. "Judges of appeal have resigned, judges of the high court will not hear cases brought by the government, the attorney-general is confused about his role and the director of public prosecutions has quit," said the report, which was issued prior to Sapire's resignation. Commenting on Swaziland's judicial problems, a member of the IBA team that visited Swaziland, Shadrack Gutto, professor of law at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, reportedly said: "The rule of law is deteriorating against a background of confused legal structures and active government interference."