Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Yale Journal of International Law

Abstract

One night in June 2008, militants associated with Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF Party stormed a citrus farm owned by seventy-four-year-old Mike Campbell, breaking four of his ribs and his collarbone while inflicting such severe brain damage that Campbell now has difficulty in adding simple sums. In April 2009, the militants returned to seize the farm; in August, they burned down the house where Campbell and his family had lived for nearly four decades. A much less violent-but equally dramatic--event occurred on March 30, 2010, when attorneys representing Campbell and seventy-seven other white Zimbabwean farmers attached a luxury home in Cape Town, South Africa owned by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. The attachment is a far cry from full compensation for Campbell and his co-plaintiffs-and only covers the plaintiffs' legal costs of 113,000 rand (approximately US$15,500) -but it marks a rare instance of an oppressive regime being held to account for its human rights abuses. Moreover, it shows that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal, a court that opened for argument only three years ago, may be a much more powerful force for human rights in the region than the tribunal's founders ever foresaw. When Southern African leaders gathered in Windhoek, Namibia in August 1992 to sign the SADC Treaty, attendees hailed the "historic occasion" and announced the dawn of a new era of regional integration. But Article 16 of the Treaty, establishing a regional court, was an afterthought at the time; the tribunal did not come into being for nearly another decade and a half. In the meantime, SADC made modest steps toward trade liberalization but accomplished very little on the political front. Regional leaders have been unwilling to intervene in member-state affairs, and many observers have dismissed the organization as a "talking shop." SADC's weaknesses are on dramatic display in Zimbabwe: after years of inaction, the SADC Summitthe closed-door body of regional heads of state-finally brokered an accord between President Robert Mugabe and his political rivals in 2008, but it stood on the sidelines as Mugabe brazenly breached the agreement's terms. In contrast to the political paralysis of the SADC Summit, the new tribunal is active in the region. Over the past three years, it has issued a series of rulings condemning Zimbabwe's land reform program and potentially affording monetary compensation to Mugabe's victims. As with the SADC Summit, the tribunal must rely on member states to enforce its rulings. But this obstacle has not been insurmountable: the Zimbabwean Supreme Court has recognized-at least in principle-the binding effect of tribunal decisions, and South African courts are allowing private parties to enforce SADC judgments against other member states inside South Africa's borders. The experience of the tribunal so far shows that domestic and supranational judges may be able to establish a regional human rights regime even when heads of state lack the will to act and regional political institutions are crippled by inertia.

First Page

517

Volume

35

Publication Date

2010

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