Last month a rights activist living with HIV filed a test case in the newly constituted court to highlight the challenges and ill treatment facing people living with the virus in the country’s prisons. On Friday the Court ruled in favour of a man who filed an application “to force” President Robert Mugabe to set an election date that would ensure that polls are conducted by July 31st .
Then on Tuesday Zimbabwean businessman Mutumwa Mawere filed an urgent application calling for the court to confirm the provisions regarding the issue of dual citizenship and to stop the voter registration exercise, which was supposed to restart on Monday, until his case is finalised.
Mawere, who is also South African by naturalisation, says he was forced to seek legal redress after Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede told him to renounce his foreign citizenship in order to acquire Zimbabwean identification documents.
The Zimbabwean born entrepreneur now wants the court to compel the Registrar General to give him identity documents and a Zimbabwean passport, to enable him to vote in the forthcoming elections.
Mawere says according to the new constitution citizenship by birth is not revocable and there is automatic citizenship for people born to Zimbabwean parents. Mudede has no authority to try and negotiate that issue.
“The only provision that is there is that persons who acquire citizenship by registration are the only people who are affected in terms of registration. That is when the Registrar General has to deal with that application but you cannot apply to be born in a certain geography and therefore that is invalid,” Mawere added.
An individual has to be a citizen to vote in the pending polls and many Zimbabweans, especially of Malawian and Mozambican origin, are being blocked from participating in the nationwide voter registration exercise as a result of the country’s controversial citizenship laws.
“So we have also applied to the Court that the purported voter registration, pursuant to the new constitution, be stopped to allow this matter to be adjudicated in court – because if our understanding is correct, then it means there could very well be more than a million people who may be affected by this misinterpretation of the law.”
Mawere believes by law the voter registration exercise has not really started because the parliament has not “even set up the citizenship board.”
The constitutional court has to first rule on whether the application is urgent before dealing with the merits of the matter. It is not known yet how this latest application will affect the electoral process, as the court has so far ruled that general elections should be before the end of next month.
Meanwhile, legal expert Derek Matyszak says the Registrar General has often refused to implement court orders, but says he has to abide by what is in the constitution.
Matyszak agrees that the provisions of the new constitution provide that the person that is born in Zimbabwe is entitled to citizenship. He said: “It does not allow the deprivation of citizenship of a person born in Zimbabwe on the basis that they have acquired citizenship of another country. So Mr. Mudede has to apply what is in the constitution and not what he would like to be there.”
Tens of thousands of people have been removed from the voters’ roll in the past decade, often due to citizenship issues.
If Mawere wins then those people taken off the voters’ roll should be able to register or re-register. “Unfortunately if the past conduct of Mr. Mudede is anything to go by he will not do that and he will force people to institute court proceedings in the same way that Mr. Mawere is, to try and get themselves back on the voters’ roll and of course many people don’t have the resources that Mr. Mawere has to do that,” Matyszak added.
The Registrar General was not available for comment. – SW Radio Africa News
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