The Rhodesian regime's new Chief Justice, who took up office on the retirement of Sir Hugh Beadle at the beginning of February, is the former Judge President, Mr Hector Norman Macdonald (61). Macdonald returned to Rhodesia in 1950 after practising as a lawyer in Johannesburg. He was a member of the Appellate Division of the Rhodesian High Court in 1968 when it ruled that the Smith regime had achieved internal de jure status under the 1965 Constitution, and that economic sanctions imposed by the British government and other UN member states were both illegal and unconstitutional.
In an interview on his new appointment Macdonald has made clear his views on hanging and the death penalty. He felt, he said, that capital punishment should not only be retained, but reintroduced in those countries where it had been abolished. In fact, "it will be reintroduced for a larger number of offences than before. In the end it will be the only means through which respect for law and order will be restored in many countries where that respect has fallen away completely... I am quite certain that in the end we are going to be obliged to resort to the most drastic penalties for relatively minor offences."
Since March 1968, when five captured guerilla fighters were executed in Salisbury in defiance of a British royal reprieve, the Smith regime has made increasing use of the death penalty under the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act. 81 people are now known to have been sentenced to death for political offences since the regime ceased announcing executions in April 1975 (excluding those very few whose death sentences were subsequently commuted to prison terms). In recent months, trials in both conventional and "special" courts of captured guerillas, "recruits", and local people accused of assisting them have continued at a rapid pace in the face of increasingly strident attacks from the certain sections of the white political spectrum and calls for full-scale martial law to be declared. It is very probable that for every African who appears before the courts on charges under the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act, others are summarily executed by the security forces in the war zones.
A recent assurance from a spokesman for the regime's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that all captured guerillas "are treated in accordance with accepted humanitarian principles, and adequate medical attention is provided where necessary" is not borne out by a remark from Mr Mark Partridge, the regime's new Minister of Defence and as such much more closely involved in the day to day conduct of the war. The regime had "no intention of giving these murderers the status of soldiers" by treating captured guerillas as prisoners of war in terms of the Geneva Convention, he said. "These are not soldiers. They are scum and must be treated as such."
