Constitution Of Zimbabwe Research Articles

The Fall and Rise of The Cane in Zimbabwe

The legality of judicial corporal punishment is an issue which has caused considerable disagreement amongst jurists, legislators and criminal justice personnel, for its use has serious moral, constitutional and penological implications. In Zimbabwe, two decisions handed down by the Supreme Court together with a later constitutional amendment Act have highlighted the divergence of views on this matter. It is thus the intention of this article to examine critically the issue from a constitutional and penological perspective.In 1987 in S v. Ncube a full bench of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe unanimously held that the sentence of whipping for adults contravened section 15(1) of the Declaration of Rights which is contained in the Constitution of Zimbabwe in that it constituted a punishment which in its very nature was both inhuman and degrading. In his seminal judgment, Gubbay, J. A., had regard to four factors, namely: (i) the current trend of thinking amongst distinguished jurists and leading academics; (ii) the abolition of whipping in many countries of the world as being repugnant to the consciences of civilized men; (iii) the progressive move of the courts in countries in which whipping is not susceptible to constitutional attack to restrict its imposition to instances where a serious, cruel, brutal and humiliating crime has been perpetrated; (iv) the decreasing recourse to the penalty of whipping in Zimbabwe, especially over the previous ten years and the declining number of laws on the statute book in which it remained a permissible penalty.

Recent Developments in the Public Law of Francophone African States

The origin of the initial African constitutions is easy to establish. While the former British territories “received” their Westminster-type constitutions negotiated during the Lancaster House conferences, the former French territories, except Guinea, became independent under constitutions drawing heavily upon the constitution of the Fifth French Republic, of which they were virtual copies. Among the countries formerly under Belgian rule, the Congo (Zaïre) was the only one attaining independence with a constitution, theLoi fondamentaleof 1960 which was an Act of the Belgian Parliament.Therefore, initially the degree of homogeneity was fairly large; there were basically three types of constitutions and the deviation from these models was limited. Admittedly subject to adaptations all the Westminster constitutions were similar, and in fact to some extent they still are; thus in its essential features the 1980 constitution of Zimbabwe draws from the same stock as its predecessors of the early 1960s. The first constitutions of the former French territories were, likewise, very similar, inspired as they were by the French constitution of 1958. TheLoi fondamentaleof the Congo was strongly influenced by the Belgian constitution, and so was the autochthonous constitution of Burundi which was promulgated a few months after independence in 1962.Many constitutions have since succeeded these initial texts: between 1960 and 1985 there have been 43 constitutions in the 18 French-speaking countries under consideration, i.e. an average of 2·4 constitutions per country. This flow has led to a considerable diversification of constitutional types.