REDRESS/AMANI
FOREWORD
The Redress Trust (REDRESS) is an international human rights organisation with a
mandate to assist torture survivors to seek justice and other forms of reparation for
the harm they have suffered. Its national and international programmes are aimed
at ensuring that the rights of torture survivors, whoever they are, and wherever
they are located, are realised in practice. Over the past few years, we have
produced a number of reports on the prevalence of torture in Zimbabwe and the
prospects for Zimbabwean victims to obtain redress nationally and internationally.
This Report is written to draw attention to the ongoing difficulties such victims face,
given the impunity which perpetrators continue to enjoy. It is an update of a report
produced by REDRESS in March 2003 as part of a survey of law and practice in
thirty-one selected states and published on our website as the Zimbabwe Country
Report along with the other countries surveyed. We believe it is important that all
interested parties at the international, regional and national level be kept as fully
informed as possible both of the reality of torture in Zimbabwe and the problems
with which torture survivors and those working with them, especially human rights
lawyers and other human rights defenders, have to deal. It is also a contribution to
keeping the conscience of the world alive to the issues at stake in that troubled
country.
It is in this context that this revised report draws attention to the manifold legal and
institutional obstacles and problems which continue to face local, regional and
international organisations and individuals, as well as governments, concerned
about torture in Zimbabwe and the need for justice and reparations for its victims.
Torture has been practiced in Zimbabwe for decades, both before and since
independence in 1980, and remains an ever-present reality in Zimbabwe, as does
the culture of impunity for perpetrators.
The crackdown on civil society continues unabated, manifested in the persecution of
human rights defenders by an increasingly partisan police force. For survivors of
gross and systematic human rights violations in Zimbabwe, including those who
have been tortured, the future remains bleak. We believe, however, that the rights
of all such survivors to justice and other forms of reparations must be upheld and
championed, as must the fundamental right not to be tortured, and the fight against
torture itself.
iii