White farmers -- More than 90 percent of Zimbabwe's white farmers have lost their land under Mugabe's reforms.

HARARE – Zimbabwe’s beleaguered white farmers will ask the Supreme Court to order registration of a SADC Tribunal ruling outlawing government land reforms after a High Court judge conceded that the regional court’s ruling was binding but declined to register it.

One of the lawyers for the 79 farmers said they would ask the Tribunal to take the matter before South African Development Community (SADC) leaders should the Supreme Court – Zimbabwe’s highest court – fail to order registration of the land reform ruling.

Harare advocate Lewis Uriri said the farmers will in the coming weeks file an appeal in the Supreme Court against High Court Judge Bharat Patel’s ruling last week in which the judge ruled that registering and enforcing the Tribunal judgment would have a negative impact on Zimbabwe’s agrarian reforms.

Patel confirmed that Zimbabwe was bound by Tribunal rulings, rejecting claims by Harare that it does not recognise the regional court and is not bound by its judgments. But the judge declined registering the Tribunal order saying its enforcement would be against public policy.

Uriri: “We are going to file an appeal to the Supreme Court early February. The state should have seen this coming, it voluntarily took the risk to be part of the SADC Treaty. It is contrary to say invoke domestic law to defeat its obligation at international when it has undertaken to be bound.”

The Tribunal in November 2008 declared President Robert Mugabe’s chaotic and often violent land reform programme discriminatory, racist and illegal under the SADC Treaty.

The regional court, whose judgment must be formally registered with the Harare High Court for it to be enforced, also directed the Zimbabwe government not to seize land from the 79 farmers and to compensate those already evicted from their farms.

While the Tribunal’s order is confined to the group of farmers who appealed to the regional court, its enforcement would effectively undo Mugabe’s land reforms of the past decade, with all white farmers who lost land expected to use the judgment to claim their properties back.

The government would be required to evict tens of thousands of black families resettled on farms seized from whites in order to return the land to lawful owners, a move Patel described as a “political enormity” with potential to cause upheaval in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe’s land reforms that he says were necessary to correct a colonial land ownership system that reserved the best land for whites and banished blacks to poor soils, are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe into food shortages after he failed to support black villagers resettled on former white farms with inputs to maintain production.

An audit of the land reforms proposed under a power-sharing deal between Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai that agricultural experts say is prerequisite to any effort to restore order and productivity in the mainstay farming sector has failed to take off apparently because of funding problems. – ZimOnline.