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Zimbabwe on a knife-edge as gross human rights violations reported
Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum
August 11, 2008

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Background
The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum has been documenting political violence since its inception in 1998, and, since July 2001, has been issuing Monthly Political Violence Reports. In addition, the Human Rights Forum has issued a total of 34 special reports, many of these concerned with violence during elections. The Human Rights Forum has consistently indicated that the majority of the violence recorded has been undertaken by both state agents and supporters of the ZANU PF party. The Human Rights Forum has been vindicated in its allegations, both by the reports of independent human rights organizations and bodies as well as by the decisions of the Zimbabwean courts.

The Human Rights Forum's reports have received little or no consideration from the Government of Zimbabwe, as there is little or no evidence that any of its allegations have had serious attention, and the Human Rights Forum has had to continue to express its concern. Ahead of the March 2008 poll, the Human Rights Forum issued a comprehensive report on the probability of the elections being free and fair, and drew particular attention to the deteriorating human rights climate. The Human Rights Forum pointed out that there has been a steady increase in the number of alleged violations being reported to itself and its members since 2004.

As can be seen from Table 1, the run up to the elections occurred against the background of the worst year since the Human Rights Forum began reporting on political violence, with every indication that 2008 would be even worse than 2007, and certainly the monthly average is more than double the worst previous year, which was 2007.

In its May 2008 report, the Human Rights Forum also draws particular attention to the finding from its own data that human rights violations increase appreciably during elections. As can be seen from Table 2, eight of the fourteen violation types, recorded by the Human Rights Forum, increase significantly during elections. This analysis included the data from the March 2008 poll.

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