Namibia

LAY litigant Ronald Somaeb was in over his head when he attacked the right of any Namibian judge to hear the case in which he was suing the chief justice: all judges would be thinking “about (their) boss, the chief justice” and would be biased in favour of the CJ, he said. Somaeb's efforts came to nothing, however, and his case has been dismissed as vexatious and frivolous.

TO an outsider, the case might at first sight seem no more than a relatively simple dispute over ownership of the land on which a shopping mall is being built. But the case of Stantoll v Johannes involves far more complex issues than that. It is also about the difficulties surrounding state expropriation of land and subsequent expectations of compensation, at a time when this is a hot issue in many African countries.

A judge in Zimbabwe has slammed fatal domestic violence against women as 'gender-based torture'. Sentencing a man who savagely murdered his partner the judge, Amy Tsanga, said women were 'clobbered, booted, strangled, stabbed or slashed to death' by their partners. Such attacks so often happened in their own bedrooms that these spaces had become 'a deadly environment' for women.