THE ZIMBABWE HUMAN RIGHTS NGO FORUM TAKES THE NPRC TO COURT The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, after lengthy lobbying and discussions with the government that the President appoints a substantive Chairperson of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission, finally approached the High Court of Zimbabwe. In February 2018 a court application that sought to have President Mnangagwa appoint a substantive Chairperson as per the dictates of Section 251 (1) of the Constitution was lodged at the High Court of Zimbabwe with the President, the NPRC and the country’s Attorney General all as respondents, respectively. The second player in the court application sought to prevent the NPRC from going further in carrying out any work until a substantive Chairperson had been appointed. The arguments noted in the court challenge were that the NPRC was improperly constituted and thus any decisions reached without the substantive chair would be invalid at law. The position of Chairperson had fallen vacant after the demise of the late Honourable, former Speaker of Parliament Mr Cyril Ndebele in October 2016 after having served for not more than eight months since the NPRC was sworn in. After the late Mr Cyril Ndebele, on or around 27 November 2015 the President then, Mr ANNUAL REPORT 2018 Robert Mugabe went on to appoint Bishop. Ambrose Moyo who is the founder of Ecumenical Church Leaders Forum (ECLF) based in Bulawayo. In January 2018 however, when the NPRC Act was signed into law, Mrs Lillian Chigewedere, one of the Commissioners who was the Deputy to Bishop Ambrose Moyo became the acting Chairperson of the NPRC. However, she did not have additional legal qualifications as required by law. Furthermore, while it would have seemed reasonable for her to ‘act’ on behalf of the Chairperson, the situation that the country was presented with was not that the Chairperson was away temporarily. The matter was clear that the Chairperson was no longer available and thus, the President, according to the law, had to appoint another Chairperson. Any other action would have been derelict neglect of duty and an insult to constitutionalism. To make matters worse, as the Forum argued, it was not that there was a lack of candidates that matched the set criteria to fill the position in the whole population of Zimbabwe in or outside the country. The fatality of his appointment at law was that according to the Constitution he did not qualify as he did not have the additional requirement of being a person who has been trained for at least seven years to practice as a legal practitioner in Zimbabwe. The Human 22