Thread: What was the Police leadership thinking?

It's one thing to keep an eye on demonstrations that can potentially turn nasty and so it makes sense that the Police has to be notified of an impending demonstration. But ban them? On what grounds? What was the Police leadership thinking when it banned all public demonstrations on the eve of the SADC summit? Send a signal that they will brook no public demonstrations of discontent? Were they acting on political orders to prevent any loss of face during the summit? Or was it purely for security reasons? If it was the latter - as the Government's lawyers tried to argue - then it shows just how jittery the estalbishment really is about demonstrations. What do they fear? An uprising of the masses? Come on, please....

Of course it's too late now, but the High Court judgement has once and for all established that a number of laws promulgated before Independence are in conflict with the Constitution. For that we should thank the Police. I does make one wonder, though, what exactly the Law Reform Commission has been doing all these years? Will the government respect this and will it serve as a test case and judgement for similar events in the future? We shall see.....

Police Demonstration Ban Falls

Werner Menges

THE eight-day prohibition of public gatherings and demonstrations in Namibia that was proclaimed by the Namibian Police on Thursday last week was ruled to be unconstitutional yesterday.

In a ruling given by Judge Nate Ndauendapo in the High Court in Windhoek, the Police's restriction on demonstrations and gatherings in Namibia was declared to be unconstitutional, and therefore invalid and of no force and effect. The ruling is in effect until September 17 at this stage.

While he struck down the prohibition as unconstitutional, Judge Ndauendapo stopped short of also declaring section 2 of the Public Gatherings Proclamation, AG 23 of 1989, as being in conflict with Namibia's Constitution.

The decision to disallow demonstrations and gatherings in Namibia from Thursday last week to the end of this week was in effect a declaration of a state of emergency by a Police officer through a press release to the media, lawyer Norman Tjombe, who represented the group of people that challenged the ban, charged during the hearing of the case yesterday.

Source: The Namibian