Teek loses N$23m case against police, PG

FORMER Supreme Court judge Pio Teek has lost a lawsuit in which he sued the police and the prosecutor general for N$23 million over his arrest and prosecution on child-rape charges more than 15 years ago.

Teek’s claim against two police officers involved in the investigation of his case, the ministers of safety and security and of justice, prosecutor general Martha Imalwa, former chief prosecutor Danie Small and deputy prosecutor general Innocentia Nyoni failed in the Windhoek High Court on Friday.

This was after judge Boas Usiku found that Teek did not place evidence before the court to support the allegations he had made against the defendants in the matter. As a result, Usiku ruled that the defendants do not need to further answer to Teek’s legal action against them.

In his judgement, Usiku stated: “At the present, there is no evidence before court that the defendants unlawfully performed the acts/omissions attributed to them. Nor are there facts from which the alleged malfeasance may be inferred. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the defendants unlawfully infringed [Teek’s] constitutional/ statutory rights.”

Teek sued the defendants for a total of N$23,1 million. That amount included a claim for N$13,6 million for financial losses he alleged he suffered due to his retirement from his position as an appeal judge of the Supreme Court in 2005, N$3 million for shock, trauma, pain and suffering allegedly caused by his arrest and prosecution, and N$3 million for injury to his dignity.

He filed the lawsuit against the prosecutor general, the two senior prosecutors involved in his prosecution after his initial acquittal, the two police investigators and the other defendants after the Supreme Court in December 2018 finally dismissed an appeal by the state against his acquittal in the High Court in December 2010.

Teek was arrested at the end of January 2005, after two girls – aged 10 and nine years old, respectively – alleged he had sexually assaulted them at his home in the Brakwater area near Windhoek on the evening of 28 January 2005.

Having been suspended from his judicial post following his arrest, Teek retired as a judge in October 2005, at the age of 58.

He stood trial in the High Court in 2006 on eight charges, including two counts of rape, two charges of abduction, alternatively kidnapping, and two counts of committing an indecent act with a child under the age of 16.

In July 2006, Teek was found not guilty on all counts.

The state appealed against that acquittal, and three South African acting appeal judges of the Supreme Court overturned the trial judge’s decision in April 2009 and directed that Teek should continue to stand trial on six of the eight charges he had been facing.

When his trial resumed in the High Court near the end of 2009, Teek opted to not testify in his own defence, and was again found not guilty by the trial judge.

That was still not the end of the matter, as the state again appealed to the Supreme Court, where the appeal was eventually heard in October 2018 and dismissed two months later.

In his judgement on Friday, Usiku noted that Teek relied on the evidence presented by the state during his trial and the state’s arguments to the Supreme Court to prove his claim.

However, none of that was admissible evidence in respect of Teek’s claim against the defendants, the judge stated.

He also found that Teek did not present evidence to support his claim that he had suffered financial damages amounting to N$13,6 million because of his early retirement.

Teek, who conducted the litigation without legal representation, was ordered to pay the defendants’ legal costs in the matter.

Nixon Marcus represented the defendants.