236Nor can the Court accept the applicants’ argument that, for a large number of them, the grounds for the contested acts referred to their conduct in the past, indeed to a rather distant past in some cases. Plainly, since the authors of the contested acts had decided to refer to the specific conduct of one or other of the persons or entities targeted by the contested acts, there could be no question of conduct other than in the past. Such a reference cannot be deemed to be of no relevance solely because the conduct in question dates from the more or less remote past. In the absence of arguments and evidence to the contrary, the view can properly be taken that individuals who, in the past, were personally involved in the acts of violence and in the infringements of fundamental rights which the authors of the contested acts impute to those who alone formed the leadership of Zimbabwe before the formation of the Government of National Unity, and to the political party of which they were members, namely ZANU-PF, remain, for the purposes of the case-law mentioned in paragraph 235 above, ‘associates’ of the leaders of that country, and consequently the imposition on them of restrictive measures is, according to that same case-law, legitimate.
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