South Africa is marking 27 years of freedom at a time when the impact of COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating with respect to a whole range of human rights especially social, economic and cultural rights.
Hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the misery of statelessness in Zimbabwe have been forced to the margins of society, and struggle to access education, healthcare and housing, Amnesty International said today in a new report. The organization interviewed descendants of migrant workers who settled in Zimbabwe pre-independence, as well as survivors of the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s; two groups locked out of citizenship by a cruel combination of discrimination and bureaucracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the terrible legacy of deliberately divisive and destructive policies that have perpetuated inequality, discrimination, and oppression across Sub-Saharan Africa, Amnesty International said in its annual report published today.
Amnesty International announced today the appointment of Dr. Agnès Callamard, a leading international human rights expert, as its new Secretary General, effective immediately.
Prisoners around the world have been forgotten during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from Amnesty International, as prisons have faced systemic challenges to prevent the spread of the virus, with control measures leading to serious human rights violations. The organization is calling for the millions of people languishing in overcrowded cells to be included in national vaccination roll-outs.
11 March 2021
On 25 February president Emmerson Mnangagwa announced at a public rally that although vaccination will not be mandatory, there will come a time when those who have not been inoculated will not have access to jobs and public transport. His statements were reiterated by his governing party’s ZANU PF youth secretary, Godfrey Mugwadi, who stated that those who refuse to be vaccinated were a threat to national security. Amnesty International is concerned that the potential threats of mandatory vaccination made by the Zimbabwean authorities violate rights guaranteed in the constitution and international law.
Amnesty International Zimbabwe joins the rest of the world in commemorating World Radio Day adopted by the United General Assembly in 2012 and which falls on 13 February. This year the commemoration comes at a time when Zimbabwe has started licensing community radios which is a step in the right direction. Whilst acknowledging the steps taken by the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe to license community radio initiatives, Amnesty International is concerned with the slow pace and small numbers of community radio that have been licensed to date. The authorities are not doing enough to fast-track and expand the process.
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13 January 2021
17 November 2020
In the year since the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights gave fresh impetus to the global campaign for the abolition of the death penalty by declaring the mandatory death penalty “unfair” and a “failure in due process”, at least four countries – Botswana, Egypt, Somalia and South Sudan – have carried out executions, Amnesty International said today.