Zimbabwe announced on Sunday that it would set up its own human rights commission as part of its ”quest to create a culture of human rights”, a state-owned weekly reported.
Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa told the Sunday Mail that the Constitution would be amended to establish the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission.
”The commission will have the mandate to receive, investigate and redress any complaints relating to human rights,” the weekly said.
”It will also have the responsibility to promote and protect human rights as Zimbabwe continues its quest to creat a culture of human rights,” it added.
Chinamasa said the decision to create a human rights body came after an influx of ”manufactured” human rights abuses reports by non-governmental organisations in the past six years.
”They [NGO’s] manufacture and peddle false allegations and they also recycle them,” said Chinamasa, adding that these allegations were aimed at attacking President Robert Mugabe’s government.
Earlier this month the Southern African country’s human rights record was ranked amongst the worst in the world, according to the United States State Department’s annual Report on Human Rights Practices for 2005.
Zimbabwe was the only African country ranked alongside North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), Iran, Cuba, China and Belarus, considered to be nations where political power is concentrated in the hands of rulers who are not accountable to their actions.
In its report on Zimbabwe, Washington cited the continued muzzling of the privately owned press, government corruption, executive influence and interference of the judiciary, life-threatening prison conditions and politicisation of state apparatus.
Chinamasa said the establishment of the body was not an admission that Zimbabwe had a human rights problem but that the country was merely moving in line with trends in the region.
”In any case there is no country in the world where on a daily basis there are no violations of human rights,” Chinamasa said.
”So the commission will help to ferret these violations and redress them. The commission will help to promote a human rights culture to minimise occurences of human rights violations,” he said. – Sapa-AFP