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Zim's Daily News gets reprieve
27/01/2004 20:25 - (SA)
Harare - The Daily News, Zimbabwe's lone independent daily newspaper, on Tuesday won a stay of execution in its battle to continue publishing.
The country's most senior judge postponed a bid by state lawyers to have the newspaper closed until the Supreme Court had decided on an array of law suits involving the paper.
Chief justice Godfrey Chidyausiku told lawyers from the state and Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), which owns the newspaper: "It's so untidy to deal with these matters piecemeal".
He ordered the lawyers to consult each other to consolidate a confusing range of cases.
The judge also ordered that they seek a court date for Tuesday next week when the Supreme Court is due to hear ANZ's constitutional challenge to press gag laws passed in March 2002. These had been used to arrests scores of journalists and to ban the Daily News in September last year.
Earlier, in the court, government and ANZ lawyers had argued over three court orders, granted since September, that revoked the banning order by the state-appointed media commission and the series of appeals filed against the orders by the government.
All the orders were ignored by authorities who kept heavily armed police in illegal occupation of the newspaper's offices and printing rooms, until Wednesday last week when a fourth court order was finally obeyed.
The first court order came a month after the banning when a judge ruled that the media commission, which can stop journalists and newspapers from operating by refusing to issue them with press licences, was "biased" when it banned the gutsy tabloid. The order also said the commission had been "improperly constituted".
Chidyausiku told State advocate Johannes Tomana his argument was an attempt by the media commission to have the newspaper closed "through the back door".
The Daily News has been a major thorn in President Robert Mugabe's side since it began publishing in March 1999, winning a million readers with its outspoken criticism of Mugabe's government and exposure of the state's violent repression of opponents.
The newspaper had been bombed twice and had dozens of its staff - editors, journalists and even vendors - arrested, tortured and harassed.
- SAPA
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