Amushelelo drops urgent release bid

Detained social activist and investment scheme operator Michael Amushelelo has withdrawn an urgent application in which he was asking the High Court to order his immediate release from custody.

Amushelelo’s lawyer, Kadhila Amoomo, informed the Windhoek High Court on Tuesday that an urgent application by Amushelelo that was scheduled to be heard yesterday, would be withdrawn instead.

As a result of that notice, judge Boas Usiku yesterday ordered that Amushelelo’s application is removed from the court roll and regarded as finalised.

Amushelelo (32) wanted to ask the court to declare that the conduct of the clerk of the Windhoek Magistrate’s Court in Katutura, who he said had failed to deliver the record of his failed bail application to the High Court, is unlawful and unconstitutional.

He also requested the court to order that he should be released from custody immediately.

Amushelelo has been held in custody since his arrest on 21 March, after he had allegedly been involved in a public demonstration about unemployment in Namibia which the police had prohibited from going ahead.

He and two co-accused – activist Dimbulukeni Nauyoma and Popular Democratic Movement parliamentarian Inna Hengari – are charged with counts of public violence, incitement to public violence, and malicious damage to property, on which they are scheduled to go on trial on 25 August.

While Nauyoma and Hengari have both been granted bail in an amount of N$5 000, Amushelelo has remained in custody after a bail application by him was dismissed in the Windhoek Magistrate’s Court in Katutura on 20 April.

Amoomo filed an appeal to the High Court a week after Amushelelo was refused bail. Since then, however, the clerk of the magistrate’s court has not delivered the record of proceedings during the bail hearing to the High Court, where the case record is needed for the appeal to be heard, Amushelelo is complaining in an affidavit filed at the High Court.

He says the delay in delivering the case record to the High Court is a breach of the rules of the magistrate’s court and has “completely sabotaged the speedy finalisation of my appeal”. Claiming that the law has not been complied with, Amushelelo also alleges: “This is in violation of my right to appeal and my right to liberty.”

In an answering affidavit filed at the court, a chief legal clerk at the Windhoek Magistrate’s Court in Katutura, Simon Mwandi, says he made numerous enquiries about the transcription of court proceedings during the bail hearing, and that he finally received the transcribed record on Monday this week.

Amoomo notified the court that the urgent application was being withdrawn in view of an undertaking that the required record was to be sent to the High Court on Wednesday.

Also in an affidavit filed at the High Court, prosecutor general Martha Imalwa said the court can only set aside the refusal of bail on appeal or on review, and that it cannot order Amushelelo’s release while there is a valid order from the magistrate’s court for him to be held in custody.