Advocate Sottayi Katsere practised for eight years as a lawyer in Rhodesia. He left the country in May 1977 and is now Director of Manpower and Planning in ZAPU (Patriotic Front). In July 1978 he submitted evidence on the Smith regime's legal system to the UN Commission on Human Rights Ad Hoc Working Group of Experts. Extracts from his testimony support and illustrate the many criticisms that have been made of the regime's "internal settlement" of March 1978 and, in particular, of the provision in the proposed independence constitution for the retention of the existing white-dominated judiciary.
Advocate Katsere told the Working Group that "a very common experience which I encountered practising as a lawyer ... was that people would be arrested on suspicion of having committed an offence and they would be assaulted by the police in order to obtain 'confessions'. This is standard procedure, unless the accused persons are prepared to confess to the offence without any kind of pressure being put on them. The result of this is that 'confessions' are extracted from accused persons and they are used as evidence in court." He pointed out that while the court, under Rhodesia's Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, should in theory reject such a 'confession' if challenged by the accused on the grounds of improper methods, "the difficulty that an average black person has in a situation of this nature is that he describes police brutality - the way the statement was recorded from him — with which the white judicial officer is not familiar. The reason for this is that the white person in that country is normally treated with courtesy by the police. And when you tell a white person in Rhodesia that you have been assaulted by the police, he is not prepared to believe you because it has never happened to him. These are the people who have to decide whether or not the witness is telling the truth or the accused is telling the truth; and it is on the basis of their belief of what he says that the statement goes forward as evidence or gets thrown out".
Advocate Katsere further stated that as part of police procedure for extracting evidence from witnesses, the latter were frequently taken from their homes and held in virtual imprisonment in police camps for periods of up to a year prior to the trial, with no kind of income whatsoever. "They are in fact held against their own will for as long as it is necessary to hold them, until they give their evidence."
Partially on the part of the judiciary was also apparent in the courts' treatment of political captured guerilla fighters and other political offences under the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act. While in ordinary common-law cases the legal system in Advocate Katsere's experience still operated with justice, "in cases of a political nature one cannot even trust the judiciary ... because (it) is entirely white and even when these people are called upon to decide cases in which the future of the white minority in that country is involved, they are in fact sitting as judges in their own case. As a result, it does not matter how well the case of an accused person as a freedom fighter is put, how well it is pleaded before them, conviction is certain. The may be very good judges in an ordinary theft case, but when it comes to a question of whether or not a person is guilty of having been a freedom fighter, or having assisted freedom fighters, invariably the person is convicted. This is because the judges themselves are placed in the position in which they have got to decide on their own future in that country ... This is a trend which has set in, of course, with the advent of the war, when the very existence of the white community in that country is threatened. When I say this I am referring to the High Court judges. They are selected from experienced practitioners of standing from the Rhodesian bar, from the South African bar, and in some cases from the English bar. But as the situation has deteriorated, people have become polarised into positions, and then one begins to sense a slight departure from the expected principles that the judiciary has stood for, towards a more partisan approach to cases."
