The President wields extraordinary power, granted within a civilian-institutional framework,
and there is considerable evidence that the state is strongly inter-penetrated by the military.
Since 1980, Zimbabwe has initiated a number of transitional justice mechanisms that include
amnesties, judicial prosecutions, vetting, reparations and customary justice. In Zimbabwe, as
in other countries, amnesties have been used to end civil war and to obviate scrutiny of the
state‟s involvement, whilst there has not been an official truth commission.
However, the truth has not been missing in Zimbabwe as civil society organisations have
extensively documented the many gross human rights violations that have occurred in post
independent Zimbabwe. Recourse to the judicial justice has also been undertaken in
Zimbabwe, through civil prosecutions mostly. The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum
has documented 7250 cases of human rights violations from 1998-2008, and, of these cases
588 cases are still active and at various stages of litigation in the courts. .
Efforts for criminal prosecutions have also been initiated by civil society organization. In
1999, a submission to the Human Rights Committee of the UN in respect of the Food Riots,
and, since 2001 local human rights organisations have ensured that the situation in Zimbabwe
has remained on the agenda of the African Commission on Human and People‟s Rights
(ACHPR).
In spite of this, Zimbabwe has been unable to make use of many of the transitional justice
mechanisms that can be used in the post-transition period, obviously because no substantial
transition has taken place, although since 2015 it might be argued that a transition is in
process.
The report concludes by stating that Zimbabwe is not in the kind of transition where official
state sanctioned transitional justice processes and mechanisms have any realistic chances of
being applied. However, there does not seem to be a single transitional justice mechanism
that could have been possibly applied pre-transition that has not been applied. Thus, where a
mechanism seemed to be impossible, Zimbabwean civil society has found another way to
keep the demand and the momentum going, and, hence, the substantial groundwork to date
has laid a firm foundation for a future transitional justice process.
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