Johannesburg: Last week, shortly before the opening of the 32nd Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit in Maputo, a South African living in Zimbabwe, Dirk Visagie, was found guilty of breaking its laws, given a substantial fine and ordered to vacate the home he has owned for more than a decade.

His crime? In a country that still experiences frequent food shortages, will produce only about half of the maize it consumes next year, and where the food products that are available in the shops are generally imported and priced in US dollars? Farming. Mr Visagie has been trying since 2001 to cultivate a variety of crops on the 42ha farm on the outskirts of the Mashonaland West town of Chegutu, which he bought in 2001 just as the now infamous Zimbabwean land invasions were starting.

Mr Visagie was not overly concerned, however, since he was buying his farm from a parastatal, and the minister of lands had issued a "certificate of no interest" for the property. Yet, no more than a month later the chairman of the local rural district council arrived to claim the farm, and when Mr Visagie refused to leave, a campaign of intimidation, harassment, vandalism and land invasion began. After six years of this, he was eventually charged with illegally occupying his own home.

But the following year the Sadc Tribunal, theoretically the highest court in the region, allowed Mr Visagie and other Zimbabwean commercial farmers to join the landmark Campbell case, which concerned the legality of the Zimbabwean government sponsored land grab. In November 2008 it ruled that the evictions flouted Zimbabwe’s own laws and were contrary to Sadc’s founding principles, and instructed that the farmers be allowed to return to their land. The tribunal later ordered that the Zimbabwean government pay $17m to victims of state-sponsored violence linked to the land evasions.

It is now a matter of record that the Zimbabwean government simply ignored the tribunal’s ruling, and its operations were suspended in 2010 after intense lobbying by Harare. Earlier this week, despite a last-ditch campaign to restore its authority as an independent defender of individual rights and the rule of law in the region, Sadc voted to turn the tribunal into a court restricted to interpreting the founding treaty and adjudicating disputes between member states.

In effect, since most of the cases heard by the tribunal to date have been brought by individuals, the Sadc states have decided to turn a blind eye to each other’s human rights abuses. This was a sad week for South Africa and the region as a whole.

• Editorial comment, Business Day.