Litigation
One of ZLHR’s two flagship programmes
involves the protection of human rights defenders
(HRDs) through the provision of legal support
services. This safety net offers not only protection
in the event of HRDs coming into conflict with
the law as a result of their peaceful and legitimate
human rights activities, but also encouraging
such work to continue and maintaining civic
space by allaying fears that HRDs will not be
able to afford legal services in the event that they
are arrested and prosecuted during the course of
their work.
The emergency and follow-up legal support
provided by ZLHR ensured that the protection,
and safety, of HRDs was guaranteed and that
they were better able to continue with their work
in the knowledge that lawyers would be available
to assist them.
The second flagship programme – public interest
litigation – directly provided social, economic and
civil remedies for a total of 786 people around the
country in 2014. The number far exceeds this, as
the judgments were able to be used in relation
those facing similar violations, whilst positive
judgments in favour of ZLHR clients had the
effect of reforming the conduct or reducing the
probability of future similar violations by state
and non-state actors alike.
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99 ZLHR undertook 323 cases in 2014 (emergency and follow-up
services, and public interest/constitutional litigation
99 43% of total cases were public interest litigation cases
99 1,386 people benefitted from ZLHR’s legal support services in
all 10 provinces
99 600 (44%) were human rights defenders provided with
emergency and follow-up legal support; 786 (56%) were people
benefitting directly from public interest litigation
99 93% success rate in emergency and follow-up cases in 2014
Type and Number of ZLHR Cases per province
ZLHR Annual Report 2014
5.2 ZLHR at National Level
Select target paragraph3
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