Tanzania

Tanzania’s judicial leadership has found a new way of keeping up to date with decisions by all members of the bench. As part of a commitment to using technology for improving court efficiency, all judgments will be loaded into the Tanzania Legal Information Institute – TanzLII – section of Tanzania’s judiciary website, immediately they are delivered. That means decisions of Tanzania’s judges will be freely available to the public as well as to judicial leaders for performance appraisal, virtually as they are handed down.

Read the judgment

The original case was brought by human rights defender Bob Chacha Wangwe, along with other human rights groups, opposition parties and the Tanganyika Law Society.

Read the judgment

Perhaps the most interesting sentence in the whole judgment is a quotation that comes from a 1995 Court of Appeal decision. The court wrote, ‘We may observe here that we are aware of the drive to abolish the death penalty worldwide. But that has to be done, as the learned Trial Judge has aptly put it, by deliberate moves ‘to influence public opinion in a more enlightened direction’.’