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Malawian law students lose their challenge to Covid19 university closure

  • 16 April 202021 April 2020
  • by Carmel Rickard

A group of four students studying law in Malawi have lost their high court case challenging the validity of the President’s Covid-19-related directives. They also lost their challenge to the closure of their university in terms of those directives. But it was not all bad news for them – at least the students won commendation from the presiding judge for ‘taking their future seriously’.

 

Read judgment by Judge Zione Ntaba, 7 April 2020

Read judgment by Judge Kenyatta Nyirenda, 3 April 2020

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Sentencing pregnant women in Malawi – judge lays down the law

  • 2 April 20202 April 2020
  • by Carmel Rickard

The case of a heavily pregnant woman accused of stealing from other women at a shopping centre has given one of Malawi’s judges the chance to re-state the law on sentencing first offenders and those who are pregnant. The judge quoted international law on the subject, as well as Malawi’s own legislation and prison inspection reports, some of which she had written herself. She pointed out that the country’s prisons did not have proper health care facilities for dealing with pregnant women or infants and that the infant and maternal mortality rates in prison were a matter of concern.

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Malawi police will be investigated for suspect’s torture death

  • 8 May 201913 May 2019
  • by Carmel Rickard

The Malawi Human Rights Commission has released a report finding police responsible for the death, by torture, of a man unlawfully arrested on suspicion of being involved in the abduction and killing of a child with albinism. This is just the latest development in the horror of Malawi’s increasingly endangered albino people, murdered for their body parts to satisfy occult beliefs, and it follows just days after a high court judge passed the death sentence on the convicted killer of a man with albinism (see separate story).  

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Death sentence for ‘devilish’, ‘primitive’ murder of man with albinism

  • 8 May 201913 May 2019
  • by Carmel Rickard

The last court-imposed execution was carried out in Malawi during 1992. Some 15 people were on death row at the end of 2017, and though the number has increased since then there have been no further hangings. However, the question of whether the death penalty will ever actually be carried out has now been given a new urgency, following the sentence of a man convicted for murdering a fellow villager with albinism in the apparent belief that this would make him rich. Sentencing the accused, the judge reasoned that the whole country lived in fear because of “devilish, primitive” crimes against albino people, and that the courts had a duty to impose the ultimate sentence as a deterrent.

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Malawi’s national broadcaster refused permission for “live” coverage of major trial: here’s why

  • 11 April 201930 April 2019
  • by Carmel Rickard

Malawi’s high court judge Zione Jane Veronica Ntaba is no stranger to controversy. Among her decisions she found her country’s Chief Justice, Andrew Nyirenda and the whole of the Malawi Judicial Service Commission had acted irregularly, illegally and unconstitutionally. Now she has made another noteworthy decision, turning down a request to have the second half of a potentially sensational trial broadcast by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation. Here’s the background – and her reasons.

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