Tanzania

Read the judgment on TanzLII

As the rest of Tanzania was getting ready for year-end celebrations in December 2017, six people in the Mwanza region found themselves in deep trouble. Instead of spending time at home over the holiday they were in jail, after being arrested in relation to drugs charges. The six now find themselves charged under the Drug Control and Enforcement Act with trafficking in “precursor chemicals”.

Read the Rules on TanzLII

Court rules are often pretty boring to outsiders. Usually they are only of interest to lawyers who must obey them to the letter so they don’t get into trouble and make a mistake about filing deadlines, for example.

As I read the decisions of Tanzania’s highest court for its last session of 2018, I was shocked by what I found. In one appeal after another the judges agreed that the trial court had made errors so serious that they “vitiated” the proceedings, and the accused had to be released at once.