– measures which other countries have found do not simply or easily fit into traditional court procedures. Dealing with past abuses undoubtedly requires multi-faceted, combined, holistic or hybrid solutions, some of which this paper has sought to examine. Similarly, strategies to bolster the position of future victims must include a variety of mechanisms, including the creation of new institutions and systems as well as the re-building and strengthening of those existing ones badly damaged in recent years. While recognizing, therefore, that law reform in itself is only part of what will be needed, it should still be of particular concern to civil society. An obvious issue is the startling lack of confluence between aspects of Zimbabwe’s domestic law and developments in the international arena. To a considerable extent this specialized topic calls for input from both local and outside experts, and is one towards which energy ought to be directed. A stark example is that perhaps the most widespread of human rights abuses, namely torture, is not even a criminal offence per se in Zimbabwe. For years civil society has been calling upon the Zanu-PF Government to sign up the country to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and its twenty-year refusal to do so speaks volumes on the nature of the Mugabe regime in general and its successive Ministers of Justice in particular. Civil society must make it an urgent priority for any new Government not only to make Zimbabwe a party to the Convention but thereafter speedily to bring domestic legislation into line with it. Torture must be made a specific statutory crime in Zimbabwe with appropriately severe punishment for convicted perpetrators, and the numerous other legislative and administrative reforms that the Convention obliges state parties to undertake must be 41 expeditiously undertaken. This is but one of a number of fundamental international human rights treaties which the present Government has completely and 41 See Summary (Appendix II), p. xv-xvi. 31