Treason accused dispute Namibia’s territory Werner Menges FIFTEEN of the men still standing accused in the main Caprivi high treason trial yesterday launched a renewed legal attack on the High Court’s power to try them and on the Zambezi Region’s status as part of the territory of Namibia. In a surprise application filed by defence lawyer Ilse Agenbach, who is representing the 15 accused, the High Court is being asked to declare that the court has no jurisdiction in respect of the territory formerly known as the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel, that the High Court Act does not apply to that territory, and that the High Court does not have jurisdiction over the accused. They also want the court to declare that the laws under which they have been charged do not apply to the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel – the pre-Independence name by which most of the current Zambezi Region was known – and that the 15 accused were not properly and lawfully arrested and arraigned before the High Court. Lastly, they are asking the court to declare that the proceedings in their trial, whose first phase started before Judge Elton Hoff in late 2003, are a nullity, and to order that they are entitled to be discharged or to be released from further prosecution. The parameters of their jurisdiction challenge are set out in an affidavit of 191 pages by one of the accused, Thaddeus Ndala. One of the claims made in the affidavit is that the framers of Namibia’s Constitution did not regard the territory known as the Eastern Caprivi Zipfel as legally forming part of the territory of Namibia. At the end of the affidavit Ndala states that Judge Hoff will be asked to halt the trial before him until the court has adjudicated on the new jurisdiction challenge. With the trial returning to court yesterday after an adjournment of two months, Agenbach was expected to indicate to Judge Hoff whether she was ready to proceed with the trial, or if she needed more time to prepare to present her clients’ defence case to the court. The filing of the jurisdiction challenge was met with opposition not only from the prosecution team but also from Agenbach’s defence counsel colleagues. The leader of the prosecution team, Deputy Prosecutor General Herman January, said the court has already dealt with a challenge to its jurisdiction at the beginning of the trial, and that the issue has been decided by Judge Hoff and then by the Supreme Court. The renewed challenge to the court’s jurisdiction came as a surprise, January said. Several of the defence lawyers argued that the application on the court’s jurisdiction should not be dealt with by Judge Hoff in the criminal trial before him, but should proceed as a separate civil case in the High Court. “This application is in the wrong forum, it’s ill-conceived. It does not belong in this court,” one of the defence lawyers, Patrick Kauta, said. One of his defence team colleagues, Greyson Nyoni, agreed that the application had to be dealt with by another court as a civil matter. He added that a core element of the high treason charge faced by the 65 accused remaining on trial before Judge Hoff is the allegation that they owed allegiance to Namibia as a state. It is open to Agenbach to, as part of her clients’ defence case, argue that they did not owe allegiance to Namibia, Nyoni said. At the end, though, the issue would boil down to the simple question of who was in effective control of the region formerly known as the Caprivi Region, he said. Judge Hoff is due to give a ruling today on the question whether he should deal with the application. Agenbach joined the trial in mid-March, after her clients decided to end a long trial boycott which had started six years earlier in the case of some of them, and as far back as early 2005 in the case of others. The 65 accused remaining on trial are facing a total of 278 charges, which include counts of high treason, sedition, murder and attempted murder, in connection with allegations that they had taken part in a conspiracy to secede the then Caprivi Region from Namibia between 1992 and 2002.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 06:00:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015