RHODESIAN JUDGES’ DECISION RESERVED

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31760, 17 August 1968, Page 13

RHODESIAN JUDGES’ DECISION RESERVED

(N.Z. P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

SALISBURY, August 16.

The Rhodesian Government’s long battle for recognition of its legality by its own judiciary entered a crucial, and possibly final, stage yesterday, when the Appellate Division of the High Court met to hear an appeal by 32 Africans against death sentences.

The condemned men are challenging their conviction for entering the country with arms of war.

They base their appeal on the British Privy Council’s ruling last month that the Rhodesian Government and the laws It has passed since

it seized independence from Britain in 1965 are illegal. The defence invoked that ruling at their trial, but Mr Justice Harold Davies rejected it last week, saying that in his view Mr lan Smith's Government had achieved internal de jure status. Mr Justice Davies said Rhodesian courts were no longer bound by decisions of the Privy Council, the highest court of appeal in the legal system under which all but one of the country’s judges were appointed. The question is now whether the Appellate Division will uphold Mr Jnustice Davies’s decision or overrule it.

Two of the judges sitting yesterday, Judge President Sir Vincent Quenet and Mr Justice Hector MacDonald, are already on record as saying that the postindependence 1965 Constitution has legal standing.

The other member of the three-man Bench hearing the appeal, the Chief Justice (Sir Hugh Beadle), accorded the Government only de facto status when the issue last came before him. If Sir Hugh Beadle decides that the Government has since achieved de jure status, the rebel regime will have finally received legal recognition from its own judiciary. The judges’ decision has been reserved. DEATH SENTENCE

Another Rhodesian-born African guerrilla. Sly Masuku, was sentenced to death in the Salisbury High Court yesterday for killing two Rhodesian ■’oldiers in bush fighting last March. Masuku, condemned on a murder charge, said he and his companions were not called upon to surrender as the Rhodesian soldiers moved in, so he fired a burst from his machine-gun. Mr Justice Davies said there was no legal right for organised bodies of armed men to complain if they were attacked without parley, and

they had no legal right to defend themselves with weapons when attacked by the forces of law and order.

Masuku, who, the judge said, was among a considerable party who had crossed into Rhodesia from Zambia with modern weapons, declared he had nothing against the white man.

“The fight was simply directed at the law, which is discriminatory in Rhodesia,” he told the court. In London, about 50 demonstrators gathered outside Rhodesia House to protest against the death sentences passed last Friday.

The demonstrators, members of a British antiapartheid movement, carried posters saying “Smash Fascism in Rhodesia” and “End Smith’s Nazi Rule."