Human Rights Archive Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s acute need for justice and reconciliation highlights a longstanding tension in transitional justice practice. The need for transitional justice processes in Zimbabwe has been clear since at least 2003, when Zimbabwean civil society articulated an ambitious set of transitional justice objectives in the Johannesburg Symposium.

This newsletter details the developments in our country around transitional justice issues to give you a better view of the transitional justice landscape in Zimbabwe today. It covers the activities of the NPRC, our activities, and publications, the activities of our stakeholders and other global developments.

The reporting year 2017-2018 was characterised by groundbreaking activities for the NTJWG.The social,political and economic environment in Zimbabwe during the reporting period was also laden with a lot of developments.

This newsletter serves to keep you up to speed with transitional justice processes in the country.

This briefing seeks to draw the Executive’s attention to the important developments in our country as they relate to transitional justice, healing and reconciliation.

This report carries a summary of the issued presented to the NPRC. In the briefing, the NTJWG raised several issues of concern to Zimbabwe’s transitional justice journey.

This newsletter highlights activities carried out between February and March 2019

In this Code of Inclusion, NTJWG advances the mandate given by stakeholders to ensure that the processes of transitional justice in Zimbabwe are aligned to the expectations of the people of Zimbabwe and meet the best international standards.

This study is based on the major premise that Zimbabwe has had only one major transition that is from colonial settler rule in 1980, although there have been some political accommodations such as the 1997 Unity Accord and the 2008 Global Political Agreement.

This report is the product of research that was undertaken in Zimbabwe during 2004 in the wake of the August 2003 symposium. In 2003, there was considerable speculation about the prospects of political talks, and even some sort of ‘negotiated settlement’ between the ruling ZANU(PF) and the opposition MDC.

This report is a follow-up to the Taking Transitional Justice to the People outreach project, which commenced in 2009, during which the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (the Forum) went to local communities across the country to introduce the discussion on transitional justice.

Transitional justice is crucial in dealing with the past and in achieving reconciliation. The United Nations Secretary General’s report on the rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies describes transitional justice as ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with the legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’.

This report captures all the proceedings of the symposium, speeches, expert exchanges and outcomes. With QR codes scattered across the report, the reader is invited to join the dialogue, to watch the videos of the presentations and capture the full emotion of the 2018 symposium.

This analysis, which included Zimbabwe, showed that, on average, Zimbabweans were highly dissatisfied with the state of democracy in their country, but that the winners were more satisfied than either the losers or the non-partisan, but also that the non-partisan were slightly more dissatisfied than the losers. This analysis was based on the data from the 1999 Afrobarometer survey, but one can see from the 2004 survey that this conclusion would still hold.

An outline of the five primary focuses of transitional justice processes is provided, followed by brief descriptions of some of the key terms that are used to describe aspects of the process. The purpose of providing this information is to show that transitional justice does not have to be prescriptive.

This report captures the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Transitional Justice in Zimbabwe held from 9th to 11th October 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The conference discussed the prospects of establishing an effective National Peace and Reconciliation Commission in Zimbabwe, which meets the expectations of the people and is also in sync with international best practices.