Namibia and Zimbabwe have reaffirmed their commitment to ongoing cooperation between their judiciaries following a meeting in Windhoek between Chief Justice Peter Shivute and Zimbabwe’s Chief Justice Luke Malaba.

The engagement focused on the exchange of knowledge and experiences between the two court systems, with plans to deepen collaboration in areas such as court administration, judicial training, and case management practices.

This visit by Chief Justice Malaba forms part of an established cooperation framework that has seen reciprocal visits and training programmes. Judicial officers from both countries have participated in study exchanges aimed at sharing and adopting best practices.

Chief Justice Peter Shivute highlighted the progress made so far:
“We are working on a number of areas where we take benchmarks from one another and compare notes, exchange visits both at the level of the Chief Justices and at the level of the administration. We have had an exchange of visits, a delegation participating in our aspiring judges training course, and a delegation from the judiciary of Zimbabwe coming to benchmark and see how we run our Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) training programme.”

Chief Justice Luke Malaba expressed his readiness to continue opening doors for mutual benchmarking:
“I’m happy to say Zimbabwe is ready to continue to open doors to the Namibian judiciary to benchmark on areas where we are stronger, just as I’m happy that you have also been very willing to ensure that institutionally, the judiciary of Namibia is available in allowing us to also benchmark on matters where you are stronger than us. This arrangement benefits both the people of Namibia and Zimbabwe.”

Justice Malaba described the engagement as a significant step in deepening the already warm and productive relationship between the two judicial institutions.