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ROHR Africa Day commemoration statement
Restoration of Human Rights (ROHR)
May 25, 2011

ROHR Zimbabwe joins the rest of the African continent in commemorating this year's Africa Day, under the theme, Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development. As we take time to self introspect the journey that Africa as a continent and individual states has traveled since the enactment of regional bodies set up to carry an oversight on the welfare of people, democracy and good governance, we are saddened by the unfolding reality that there is still a huge gap on the agreed basic standards and what is prevailing on the ground.

As noted by MISA Zimbabwe in their Africa Day statement, that Zimbabwe and Eritrea are among the topping countries on the continent for the wrong reasons of denying their people free media and the right to freedom of expression. In the face of growing agitation that has given birth to the historic uprisings in North Africa for the demand of human rights, democracy and an end to autocratic rule, ROHR Zimbabwe's major concern is that the African institutions for too long have disregarded the voice of the African people's clamor for freedom.

We are concerned that the AU in particular has defected a lot in compromising with the extremism that it was formed to mitigate among other conflict issues besieging Individual states. Since the adoption of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights in 1981 by the AU, there has not been effective monitoring and evaluation on the implementation and observance of its provisions for the benefit of Africans within member states.

There is continued denial of human rights, bad governance, undermining of the Rule of Law, dictatorial rule and poorly administered elections to the detriment of an inconducive environment; it is premature to talk of Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development. The youth make up the majority population in Zimbabwe and yet they remain without a voice and equitable representation on critical platforms. The existing initiatives to empower the youth have gone as far as lip singing, propaganda campaign tools, turned out to be heavily politicized discriminating on the grounds of political affiliation to mock the principle of the equality of all above anything else.

It is nerve wrecking to note that even on the eve of the Africa Day, the law enforcement agents have engaged on an offensive targeting civil society players and human rights defenders working in communities. In the past few days civil society staff from Centre for Community Development in Zimbabwe (CCDZ), ZimRights, and Institute for Young Women among other organizations, have either been arrested, detained or held up in cells for unsubstantiated causes. ROHR Zimbabwe holds that the coalition government can not concede to the idea of elections in the midst of evidence of an unreformed security sector that is tantamount to swaying the vote of the people as witnessed in the last bloody elections of March and June 2008.

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