Towards a Conducive Environment for Women HRDs 39 Ncube thinks that society must understand their rights and responsibilties for abuse of women in all spheres of life to stop and feels that women of WOZA are very strong and can overcome many situations because of their form of resistance – Tough Love – as well as their dream of an end to the harassment and intimidation of women HRDS by the police. 4.4 Human rights Lawyers Their activities centre around litigation and they are the last line of defence for community members, CSOs and other HRDs who have suffered rights violations. They also capacitate communities to be able to assert their rights. Agnes Muzondo is a legal practitioner who has worked in human rights for over nine years. She was inspired to become a human rights defender after observing the injustices faced by vulnerable persons including women, children and those with limited resources to access justice through the country’s justice delivery system. It is her intention to be an advocate for positive social change through the use of progressive legislation and policy through awareness raising and litigation. Muzondo is currently employed at ZLHR as Project Lawyer where she focuses on accountability of institutions and the alignment of laws to the new Constitution. She is part of a team that has been critically analysing laws and presenting policy briefs and positions papers to Parliament with a view to playing a part in crafting laws that protect all citizens including the most vulnerable. She has also been responsible for conceptualising and implementing education programmes for a cross-section of stakeholders including HRDs and government institutions and assisted in organising regional symposia to formulate guidelines of best practices for effective administration of justice in Zimbabwe and the SADC region. Beatrice Mtetwa is a human rights lawyer: she is loved by human rights activists and hated by perpetrators of human rights abuses in equal measure. The numerous awards she has won for her work, and the frequent arrests and harassment she has endured for the same work, are testament to her tenacity. Starting off as a prosecutor in Swaziland after graduating from law school in 1981, Mtetwa moved to Zimbabwe in 1983 and continued as a prosecutor until 1989. Today, she is a partner in Mtetwa and Nyambirai Legal Practitioners and is one of the world’s most recognisable human rights defenders. For Mtetwa all human rights are equally important, hence her involvement in a myriad of cases and issues ranging from civil and political rights to the rights of the vulnerable – children, women and prisoners. But her good work has also attracted hostility from state agents and she has been arrested, detained and even imprisoned for conducting her professional duties. One of her most horrendous experiences was being sent to remand prison after her arrest on 17 March 2013 for representing a political client. The harassment took a sinister and personal turn during the same year. “My personal life was dissected in all respects. Police were sent to look at files that had nothing to do with the case; going to the Law Society to see if my file had complaints from clients, going to the High Court to look at my divorce files, going to my ex-husband to dish out dirt on me, going to ZIMRA to see if I had smuggled anything into the country” she recalled. Yet, despite all this, she remains unwaveringly committed to human rights work. Bellinda Chinowawa is a Projects Lawyer at ZLHR. She is a litigator with a special interest in strategic impact litigation. Using ZLHR’s unique position as a vanguard for the downtrodden, Chinowawa has played a role in the use of the law to advance social justice and she strives to protect the rights and dignity of those who find themselves at the mercy of the state. When