significance. Not only are these countries geographic neighbours, but South Africa shares with them the same English colonial experience which has had a deep influence on our law; we of course also share the Roman-Dutch legal tradition. Unlike our Constitution, the Namibian Constitution does not have a general limitation clause. Article 22 however specifies how limitations, whether they are built-in or are imposed by other laws, are to be employed. In Ex Parte Attorney-General, Namibia, Mahomed AJA had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that the infliction of corporal punishment, whether on adults or juveniles, was inconsistent with article 8 of the Namibian Constitution and constituted "inhuman or degrading" punishment.[1]
[32] In S v Ncube; S v Tshuma and S v Ndhlovu the Zimbabwe Supreme Court, dealing with the issue of corporal punishment for adults, held that the practice was inhuman and degrading in violation of section 15(1) of the Declaration of Rights of the Zimbabwe Constitution which prohibits "torture or inhuman or degrading punishment."[2] The same conclusion was reached with respect to juvenile whipping by the Zimbabwe High Court in S v F.[3] Juvenile whipping was held to constitute inhuman and degrading punishment by the Zimbabwe Supreme Court in S v Juvenile.[4] Gubbay JA characterised juvenile whipping as:
"… inherently brutal and cruel; for its infliction is attended by acute physical pain. After all, that is precisely what it is designed to achieve … In short, whipping, which invades the integrity of the human body, is an antiquated and inhuman punishment which blocks the way to understanding the pathology of crime."[5]
[33] The Court in Tyrer v United Kingdom characterised the whipping of a juvenile thus:
"The very nature of judicial corporal punishment is that it involves one human being inflicting physical violence on another human
