A Curious Decision by Zambia’s Highest Court: Six Years Imprisonment for Civil Contempt?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract On 23 November 2018, the Supreme Court of Zambia delivered a judgement which suggests that Zambian judges have virtually unbridled power to move on their own motion to punish for contempt of court anyone who criticises their judicial decisions. This article considers that judgement. It argues that whilst justice might well have been done in the case in question, it was certainly not seen to be done. Two main reasons are given for this argument. First, the judges appeared to have acted both as prosecutors and adjudicators in their own cause when it was neither urgent nor imperative to act immediately on their own motion. Second, the classification by the Court of the contempt in question as civil contempt rather than criminal contempt is alien to the common law world. The article culminates in a clarion call for the Zambian legislature to intervene and clarify the law of contempt of court to avert capricious and unbridled invocation of the judicial power to punish for contempt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".