IV. Failure to Undertake Legislative Reforms
Pro-ZANU-PF elements in the new government continue to use repressive legislation enacted when they were the sole party in power. The police invoke laws like the Public Order and Security Act (POSA)[51] to violate people’s basic rights. ZANU-PF officials in the police, the prosecuting authority, the Attorney General’s office and on the bench continue to abuse various provisions of these draconian laws to violate Zimbabweans’ rights to liberty, peaceful assembly, association, and free expression.[52] Despite formal commitments made under the GPA, there are still no indications that the new government will repeal or even amend these laws.[53]
The government has begun a Parliament-led constitutional reform process, as envisaged in the GPA, which should ultimately create a framework that enshrines international human rights principles and standards.[54] However, the process itself has been riddled with controversy. Key civil society organizations, including the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU), and the Zimbabwe chapter of Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), have rejected the process as not being sufficiently informed by popular will or participation.[55]
Independently, Human Rights Watch has assessed the direction of the debate and controversy surrounding the process and concludes that it offers false hopes for reform. The process is also unlikely in its current form to deliver the new, rights-respecting constitution that Zimbabwe desperately needs in order to emerge from its long-standing crisis. Human Rights Watch believes that fundamental rights and key electoral reforms should be implemented immediately without waiting for constitutional reform due to well-founded concerns that, like the constitutional reform process of 2000, the current process may fail to deliver change.[56]
[51] The Public Order and Security Act severely limits rights to demonstrate and criminalizes “insulting” the president of Zimbabwe and publishing “inaccurate” information. These provisions have been used to harass, arrest, and prosecute journalists. Furthermore, the police have loosely interpreted certain provisions of the POSA to justify arbitrary arrests. For instance, article 4 merely requires that the police be notified ahead of time about a public meeting; it is not required that police grant permission for a meeting to go ahead. However, the police often insist that police permission to hold public meetings or demonstrations is required, not mere notification, and often this permission is withheld on arbitrary grounds. Other restrictive laws are: the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, which criminalizes the publication of “inaccurate” information and, in article 31, provides for a maximum sentence of up to 20 years of imprisonment with hard labor for a person convicted of that offense; the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, whose section 121 is often invoked by prosecutors to deny accused persons bail; and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which duplicates criminalization of “publishing falsehoods” under the POSA and severely curtails freedom of expression by requiring all practicing journalists to be registered by a partisan Media Information Commission. The Media Information Commission is set to be replaced by a new body, the Zimbabwe Media Information Commission, which has not yet been constituted.
[52] Human Rights Watch, A Call to Action: The Crisis in Zimbabwe, August 2007, http://www.hrw.org/node/77965.
[53] Article 19 of the Global Political Agreement recognizes “the importance of the right to freedom of expression and the role of the media in a multiparty democracy,” and anticipates an open media environment.
[54] Article 6 of the Global Political Agreement sets out the mechanisms and timeframe for Zimbabweans to make a new constitution that deepens the country’s democratic values.
[55] Simplicious Chirinda, “NCA, ZCTU in parallel constitutional process,” Zimbabwe Online, July 16, 2009, http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=4856 (accessed July 21, 2009).
[56]In February 2000 a national referendum on a proposed new constitution rejected the draft with the effect that the current constitution was retained.