state agents were responsible. But it is also important to stress that this strategy has severe limitations: it is very expensive, very slow in its process, which can be very demoralizing for all but the most determined victims, and often results in the state delaying paying damages, and even refusing to do so. For this reason, 35% of the cases never reached any conclusion, as the clients died, never re-appeared, or agency had to be renounced for a variety of reasons. Thus, whilst the strategy has had immense political and moral power, it is hardly practical when the scale of violations is as enormous as it has been in Zimbabwe over the decades. Perhaps the major advantage has been to provide a way of empirically, through the courts, supporting the claims made by the careful documentation of gross human rights violations. It may be easy for the government to dismiss the human rights reports as biased or deny the claims, but it much less difficult to do so when the claims are verified in a court of law. Here Zimbabwean civil society has good reason to feel proud, and provides a powerful tool for telling the truth. 4.7.5 Foreign Criminal Prosecutions In the pre-transitional period only 7% of countries reported foreign criminal prosecutions, but they did increase significantly in post-transitions (19%), and, of course, there has been the added impetus for such prosecutions in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the setting up of the International Criminal Court. Zimbabwe has perhaps benefitted from the wider interest in this mechanism, and has certainly attempted to use those available, given that Zimbabwe has not ratified the Rome Statute. There have been a number of creative initiatives by Zimbabwean civil society. The first was a submission to the Human Rights Committee of the UN in respect of the Food Riots, which produced serious and adverse comment by the Committee (Human Rights Forum. 1999). The UN Committee made two specific recommendations in respect of the Food Riots: 16. The Committee expresses its concern over recent reports of excessive use of force by the police and the army during food riots in 1998. The Committee urges that all cases of alleged excessive use of force committed by members of the police or the army be investigated by an independent and impartial body, that action be taken against those officers found to have committed abuses and that compensation be paid to the victims; the State party should report to the Committee thereon. Intensive training and education programmes in the field of human rights for members of the army and law enforcement officials are recommended. The Committee urges that the list of situations in which the use of lethal force is allowed under domestic law be reduced. 30. The Committee requests the State party to ensure the wide dissemination in Zimbabwe of the Covenant, the State party report and the Committee's concluding observations. Government took no action with respect to either recommendation. Another strategy has been recourse to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), which, although not a court in the strict sense, is in another way a court of public opinion. Here there have been several submissions to the Commission, most of which have 40