“Our resources could not permit us to travel all over the world to solicit the views of Zimbabweans on the contents of the draft constitution; this meant that we could only conduct outreach programmes in Zimbabwe,” a co-chair of the Select Committee of Parliament on the New Constitution, Edward Mkhosi, told IRIN.

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The report follows a joint mission to Zimbabwe in June by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to assess the national crop and food security situation.

The mission found that food security in the country has improved following government efforts and an international assistance programme which has been providing farmers with subsidised inputs.

They say that the area planted under maize, the main staple, increased by 20 per cent in 2010 to the highest level in 30 years and production rose 7 per cent over 2009.

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“My teachers keep their records and other materials at my butchery, which operates as our head office because, as you can see, there are no buildings here,” Choga told IRIN. “We have a total enrolment of 182 pupils from the first to the seventh grades, and the majority of them learn outside.”

Most of the houses in Epworth have no running water or electricity and the area is best known for its high levels of crime. Choga insisted that his institution had been registered by the local municipal authority, but said most of the schools offering primary and secondary education were unlicensed, and at the ministerial level even his school was not accredited.

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Plainly the ratio of HJ is not limited just to sexual orientation cases but will apply to all grounds covered by the Convention.

I thought it might be interesting to start with that quotation from the paragraph 38 of TM (Zimbabwe) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 916, the new Court of Appeal case on the return of asylum seekers to Zimbabwe. Clearly, the effect of HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) will go far beyond homosexual cases. However, this is not the case that starts to push any boundaries. The judgment continues:

…there is a good case for saying that where the activity which would create the risk of persecution is the need to deny disloyalty to a political party by someone whose political interests or activities are of marginal interest to their lives, this engages only the margins of their human rights and the AIT would be entitled to conclude that they would in fact be, and could be expected to be, less than frank with the Zimbabwean authorities. They would not be required to modify their beliefs or opinions in any real way. It is one thing for a person to be compelled to deny a crucial aspect of his identity affecting his whole way of life, as in HJ. Furthermore, the individual is then forced into a permanent state of denial. The Supreme Court found it unacceptable that someone should have to live a lie in order to avoid persecution. It does not necessarily follow that in no circumstances can someone be expected to tell a lie to avoid that consequence.

However, a determination of this important question will have to await another day. We heard very limited argument on this point, and for reasons I give below, I do not think it is necessary to engage with this submission in order to resolve these appeals.

The suggested approach is obiter dicta but would represent a real compromise of the principled position adopted by the Supreme Court in homosexual cases. It is true, though, I suppose that a person cannot just be a bit gay whereas he or she can be a bit political.

Anyway, this new TM (Zimbabwe) case represents a step back from attempts at the Court of Appeal equivalent of country guideline cases and deals very much with the facts of the individual appellants. All three appeals were dismissed.

In so doing, though, the Lord Justice Elias refuses to go behind RN (Zimbabwe), which remains good (pseudo-)law and is still considered binding, even by the Court of Appeal. He comments that it is unsatisfactory that the court is so constrained, but accepts that it is. Many immigration judges and even senior immigration judges have not felt similar bound, for some reason.

The appeals fail on their facts and on the law of appeals. No errors of law are discerned in the tribunal determinations, which are held to have sufficiently addressed the impact of RN. The sur place activity of the appellants was not held by the tribunal to be sufficient to place them at risk, and the Court of Appeal detects no error there.

Maybe I should create a tribunal upheld category to accompany tribunal overturned again?

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This was the conundrum facing the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, the diamond trade’s international watchdog, when it recently met in Israel to decide whether to continue to ban the sale of Zimbabwe’s alleged “blood diamonds” or to let sales resume. Zimbabwe’s ministry of mines, controlled by ZANU-PF, reported earlier this month that it had stockpiled 4.6m carats of diamonds, worth some $1.7 billion, since the organisation suspended official sales in November after allegations that troops guarding the fields had, among other atrocities, massacred more than 200 suspected illegal panners.

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Terror returned to Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms last week when supporters of president Robert Mugabe launched a fresh land grab. That was the claim of the Commercial Farmers Union, representing the remaining 300 white farmers still on their properties. It said a new surge of violence erupted on 16 farms with the looting of crops and equipment.

In eastern Zimbabwe, a black farm foreman was beaten unconscious and a farmer’s wife was barricaded into her homestead and given four hours to leave, the union alleged. It said police had not responded to calls for help.

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When I was moving to and from Zimbabwe for The Sunday Times between 1997 and 2008, the British embassy in Harare was a byword among hacks for its pusillanimity. Mugabe hurled every imaginable insult at the British and it made no reply. Even when the regime committed horrendous human-rights abuses the embassy generally said little, in sharp contrast to the Americans who were furiously outspoken. This was probably less to do with colonial guilt than an unwillingness to give Mugabe — who repeatedly insisted that Britain wished to recolonise Zimbabwe — any bigger a target than absolutely necessary. There may have been less honourable motives, too. When Mugabe was massacring 20,000 Ndebeles in the mid-1980s Britain’s representative, Sir Martin Evans, did nothing: “It wasn’t pleasant and people were being killed but…I don’t think anything was to be gained by protesting to Mugabe about it.”

Philip Barclay’s book gives an altogether better impression. A junior British diplomat in Harare in 2006-9, Barclay took full advantage of his position to become immersed in Zimbabwe’s frightening and violent political life and he seems to have kept a diary, for he is able to draw on many vivid experiences to convey the detail and atmosphere of a country that has a deadly beauty. (Under a pseudonym he also wrote for The Sunday Times.)

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