Violence perpetrators must face justice

THE Forum managed to draft and serve the responsible perpetrators with 120 notices of intention to sue for various claims due to January 2019 violence. These claims were mainly for shock, pain, suffering, loss of patrimonial property and contumelia.

These notices were served mainly to the Minister of Defence, and War Veterans Affairs, Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage and the Police Commissioner-General, in their official capacities for vicarious liability resulting from the actions of security officers that perpetrated violence on the victims.

Although the Forum received instructions to institute legal proceedings for civil suit on the aforesaid 120 cases hence the notices of intention to sue, 38 of these cases are still at that stage for various reasons.

In some of the cases, clients are no longer reachable on the contact details provided to us for us to obtain more details in proceeding to the next level for litigation, some are no longer wiling to pursue the matter, while others do not have medical affidavits for us to prove the suffered injuries.

The Forum managed to institute civil proceedings for 82 cases in the High Court and all these matters are at different stages. Sixty-two are now at an advanced stage for hearing and the Forum is expecting to set these matters down for hearing soon after the lockdown.

It follows that we have not yet managed to secure an award of any judgment for all these cases since all these matters are still at pleading stage.

In these matters that the Forum litigated on, the defendants’ lawyers raised various interlocutory applications to delay progression. These are the interlocutory pleadings that were raised by the defendants:

Exceptions and special pleas on 46 matters. They raised exceptions on the grounds that the victims failed to identify the security officers who wronged them and special pleas on the grounds that we served them with summons without serving them with notices of intention to sue.

Some victims were subjected to violence by security officers more than once as a result they lost hope and interest to litigate these cases.

These victims realised that the government did not compensate the victims of security forces violence even in cases where the victims successfully obtained an award from the court for compensation.