Harare - Zimbabwe's parliament has solidified President Robert Mugabe's power to seize white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks without paying compensation.
The government embarked on plans in June to seize at least 2 000 white-owned farms. Mugabe invoked temporary powers to allow him to seize the farms.
The Land Acquisition Amendment Bill, which was passed late on Wednesday after its third reading, will give him those powers permanently once he signs the bill into law. It also demands Britain, the former colonial ruler here, compensate the white farmers.
Tim Henwood, leader of Zimbabwe's 4 500 white commercial farmers, said farmers' constitutional rights were being violated by the summary seizure of land without fair and prompt compensation.
In addition to the threatened seizures, the farmers are also contending with thousands of ruling party militants who are occupying 1 700 of the farms, demanding they be given the land. Mugabe has refused to abide by court rulings ordering police to remove the squatters.
The farm occupations have disrupted planting for the coming season, Henwood said. Economists warn of imminent food shortages.
The farm seizures are to be tested in a case scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, when farmers' lawyers are expected to argue that legislators here have no power to bind another sovereign state to compensate Zimbabweans.
However the courts, independent and often critical of Mugabe's authoritarian rule, have become a target of the government.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told Parliament during a stormy debate on the Land Acquisition Bill that white farmers were "going around saying that the Supreme Court is in our pockets."
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo has made repeated calls for British-born Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay to resign. In his latest call on Wednesday in an interview with the Financial Gazette, Moyo claimed Gubbay had compromised himself by making statements criticising legislated curbs on the right of appeal.
"It is scandalous a chief justice should do such a thing. In any other democracy he should have resigned long ago," Moyo said.
Ruling party legislators have launched a motion censuring Gubbay for "abuse of power" that "will ultimately result in disintegration of the rule of law."
The motion claimed Gubbay and other judges had triggered "a constitutional crisis as a result of their determination to exercise all three arms of government - being the judiciary, the legislative and the executive."
Government officials have also said Gubbay and fellow Supreme Court Justice Nicholas McNally had lost their Zimbabwean citizenship by failing to renounce their claim to dual British citizenship under British law. They had renounced that claim under Zimbabwean law.
The judges were among an estimated 30 000 of Zimbabwe's 70 000 whites who lost the right to live and vote here because they did not make the renunciation, the state-controlled daily, The Herald, quoted Registrar-General Tobaiwa Mudede as saying.
However, Zimbabwe's constitution does not stipulate judges must be citizens, and the 1984 Citizenship Act only requires holders of dual nationality to renounce their foreign citizenship under Zimbabwean law.
Gubbay's office declined comment. - Sapa-AP