Parliament urged to pressure Pretoria to revive SADC Tribunal which died under Mugabe

Daily Maverick

14-05-2025

The SADC Tribunal's powers were terminated in 2012 after it ruled that then Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white farms was illegal.
Parliament has been urged to pressure the government to resurrect the SADC Tribunal, which would restore the rights of regional citizens to hold their governments accountable to the law.
Lwazi Somya, senior researcher at the Southern African Liaison Office (Salo), an NGO advancing regional peace and democracy, made the appeal in a briefing to Parliament's international relations committee on Wednesday.
In 2012, leaders of Southern African Development Community (SADC) states, including then President Jacob Zuma, terminated the powers of the SADC Tribunal to adjudicate complaints brought by individuals against their governments. This was after the Tribunal had ruled that then Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white farms was illegal.
Somya noted that there had later been a resuscitation of the Tribunal, called the SADC Administrative Tribunal, but that did not go far enough as it can only adjudicate matters between states.
He noted that Parliament was premised on holding the state accountable and so should be pushing the SA government to help recreate the SADC Tribunal to enhance the voice of citizens in demanding that SADC states adhere to SADC treaties and protocols.
Agenda 2063
More widely, Somya said that Parliament should be pushing for mechanisms to put pressure on states to advance the African Union's Agenda 2063 and especially its development targets.
He noted that there were several regional treaties and protocols, but many had not been domesticated in national laws. He noted, for example, that the protocol on the free movement of people under the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) had been ratified by only four of Africa's states.
Partly because of the failure to domesticate the prerequisites for intra-African trade, only 17% of the CEOs at the recent CEOs forum in Côte d'Ivoire expressed faith in the success of the AfCFTA.
Somya said South Africa had to think more collectively as it was not an island, and problems in other countries in the region – including bad governance – were, for example, driving immigration into this country.
Security challenges
He noted that the SADC region had historically been regarded as one of Africa's most stable, yet it currently faced multiple security challenges that threaten the relative stability and wellbeing of its people.
They include the Islamic State-affiliated insurgency in northern Mozambique, the M23 rebellion in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and undemocratic elections in other countries. SADC has sent military forces into both of those conflicts and then withdrawn them, with mixed results.
In Mozambique, Rwandan troops have played the bigger role in suppressing the jihadists, while the SADC Mission in DRC (SAMIDRC) has just begun withdrawing from DRC after several of its troops were killed in fierce fighting with the M23 in January.
Somya said that as the strongest state in the region, South Africa had a particular responsibility to lead SADC efforts to tackle such insurgencies and ensure proper, free and fair elections.
He said that South Africa had to cooperate more with other SADC countries to achieve that. He lamented, for instance, that only three SADC countries – SA, Tanzania and Malawi – had contributed troops to SAMIDRC.
SADC reform
Emma Powell, Democratic Alliance spokesperson on international relations, said the DA was developing a 'bold and principled' SADC reform policy to 'rescue SADC from its irrelevance'.
As part of the national coalition government, which she said required sufficient consensus on all decisions, including on foreign policy, the DA was also proposing the re-establishment of the SADC Tribunal with full authority to hear cases from individuals.
The DA was also proposing the creation of a regional SADC court for human and people's rights modelled on the African Court, with automatic referral mechanisms for gross human rights violations.
The DA's third proposal was to upgrade the current SADC Parliamentary Forum 'into a full regional parliament with legislative oversight, independent electoral monitoring power and direct citizen participation and engagement'.
The DA was also proposing that SADC agreements should be domesticated into South African law. She noted that SA had taken some steps to domesticate international law, such as that of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This was why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been unable to come to SA since being indicted by that court for abducting an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children.
'I think that it's high time that South Africa once again assumes its position as a principled leader on the continent instead of an apologist for dictators,' Powell said, deploring what she called the ANC's diplomatic complicity in failing to condemn undemocratic practices by SADC states such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Tanzania.
'Liberation solidarity vs democratic principle'
She said in the ANC's foreign policy, 'liberation solidarity… trumped democratic principle', and this was empowering former freedom fighters running some of those countries to 'use the memory of struggle to capture the state, to loot and pillage the state, to persecute their opponents and to suffocate any dissent. And by shielding them, the ANC became a barrier to reform.'
MK party MP Colleen Makhubele wanted to know what SADC thought about the emigration to the US of white Afrikaners, which began this week, and who were offered refugee status because the Trump administration alleged that a genocide of whites was happening.
'Yet this organ of SADC is quiet…' If there really was a genocide, SADC should have been the first to say so. And if not, it 'should have been the first to raise its hand and defend South Africa…'
ANC MP Mogodu Moela commended SA's involvement in efforts to silence the guns in Mozambique. He blamed the DRC conflict on competition for natural resources, which could disrupt the whole continent if not addressed.
He said the ANC supported the withdrawal of SAMIDRC from DRC in favour of peace negotiations, which he said would bring peace to eastern DRC and allow humanitarian aid to again flow into the conflict zone. DM