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Urgent appeal regarding the proposed Non-governmental Organizations Bill 2004 in Zimbabwe
International Center for Civil Society Law (IJCSL)
August 06, 2004

Dear Friends,

Thanks to all of you for subscribing to IJCSL and IJSCL-N -- I hope you are enjoying your summer reading (at least those of you in the northern hemisphere)!

From time to time there is an extreme situation to which those of us interested in promoting an enabling environment for civil society organizations must respond. Such an instance exists in Zimbabwe – it is urgent that we give our brothers and sisters there international support to try to defeat the enactment of the proposed Non-governmental Organizations Bill 2004. I have just received an electronic copy of the bill, and it is in fact as bad as we have reported in IJCSL-N in the past two months.

Not only does the bill target NGOs as such, it could also have a detrimental effect on the operations of churches in Zimbabwe. And, as many of you know, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, has been the most out-spoken critic of Robert Mugabe’s government in recent years.

This is a clearly a situation that needs our attention through the forum of the International Center for Civil Society Law. Accordingly, we are organizing a team to write comments on the proposed legislation and would encourage anyone who is interested to write back quickly to me at simon@law.edu. Lee and I are currently based in South Africa, so we won’t be able to call some of you who have responded to appeals in the past. But we hope you will join us in this most urgent effort.

All the best,

Karla W. Simon
Editor-in-Chief
IJCSL

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