More than a hundred young Mozambicans in Cabo Delgado trained with the support of the Mozambique LNG
March for rights and freedoms in Maputo, August 2015. [File photo: DW]
Organisations say the human rights situation in Mozambique is not good, demanding a specific national law to protect human rights defenders.
Several organisations warned on Monday (09.12) that human rights defenders are a vulnerable group in Mozambique and that a law to protect them is still lacking.
“The situation is not good; we still need to improve a lot,” President of the National Commission on Human Rights Luis Bitone said during a roundtable in Maputo to mark the International Day of Human Rights Defenders.
Bitone says that the Mozambican state seems to be moving at two speeds. While on the one hand it has adopted various pieces of legislation and created bodies related to the promotion of human rights, on the other, there is still a huge gap between [this] commitment and practice.
“We do not have a national mechanism to protect human rights defenders. We almost continually witness aggression and limitations on human rights defenders, even deaths, and journalists being persecuted,” he said.
The National Commission on Human Rights received 15 complaints in the last year alone but, according to Bitone, its response was limited because there is a vacuum in terms of legislation.
“Limitation of action”
Ricardo Moresse, president of the Human Rights Commission of the Mozambican Bar Association, also rued the fact that there is not yet a specific law to protect human rights defenders.
As he put it, “We are often in situations where we want to do our work, but are not worried about who will defends us, defend our situation.”
A binding instrument therefore needed to be created, “so that every person working for the defence of human rights feels safe when it comes to doing their work in the field.”
Adriano Nuvunga, director of the Centre for Democracy and Development, is also worried about the situation of human rights defenders in Mozambique, warning of “a resurgence of an environment of intimidation and threat” and a tendency to “close the democratic space in Mozambique”.
“There is also an indication that the state tends to be used by some sectors of power to limit the activities of activists,” he adds.
“Censorship” and self-censorship
Earlier this year, the arrest of journalist Amade Abubacar, who was investigating the attacks in Cabo Delgado province, was widely criticised by international human rights organisations, who accused the state of “censorship”.
Lázaro Mabunda, representing the Southern African Institute of Social Communication (MISA) in Mozambique, says that, in addition to threats, intimidation and arrests of journalists, many of these professionals “tend to be afraid to address increasingly complicated issues”.
“And this worries us because if we want to promote transparency in public acts, we have to have journalists who are not afraid of speaking freely,” Mabunda says.
Monday’s roundtable also covered the difficulties faced by LAMBDA Association, an organisation of Mozambican citizens advocating for the recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
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