Zambia Seeks a UN Rights Seat as Its Critics Lose Passports

A government that wants the next election to be quiet does not need to silence everyone. It needs to make a few people vanish, loudly enough that the rest do the arithmetic themselves.

That, I think, is what Zambia has been doing since its August 13 election, and the evidence is now on the table. Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights group, said on November 1 that Zambian police and military detained, beat and threatened opposition members, lawyers, journalists and government critics in the days before and after the vote. ^[1]

The government disputes the framing. It has not yet answered the central question: who gave the orders, and who will answer for them?

What the group says it found

President Hakainde Hichilema was reelected on August 13. Human Rights Watch said observers reported irregularities, including suspended vote counting and limits on fundamental freedoms. ^[1]

The group documented 14 cases from August that appear to be enforced disappearances, meaning cases in which the authorities refused to say where a detainee was. Victims, relatives and lawyers told the group that the military held some of them. ^[1] It also documented 61 cases in which detainees, their lawyers or their relatives alleged beatings or other violent abuse during arrest or detention. ^[1]

Those are allegations and appearances, not court findings, and the group says so. But the group built its record from cases and interviews with the people involved, and it is the pattern across them that matters.

Human Rights Watch said 18 of those held had been charged with treason, two of them also with sedition, while many had not been charged. According to Human Rights Watch, the government had not disclosed the total number of people it arrested or all the charges against them. A state that cannot or will not count its prisoners is not running a prosecution. It is running something else.

The day after

Take the sequence, because it does the arguing. On August 14, the day after the vote, Human Rights Watch said 43 opposition election monitors were detained. Their lawyer told Human Rights Watch that police denied holding them and that their whereabouts were unknown for eight days. When the lawyer finally saw them, most had swelling and serious injuries, including broken bones, and said the military had brutalized them. ^[1]

A Lusaka court ordered their immediate release on September 10. ^[1]

On the same August 14, security forces raided the Lusaka-area home of Brian Mundubile, the Tonse Alliance opposition leader. Opposition members present alleged that security forces killed Mutotwe Kafwaya, a former government minister, during the raid. ^[1]

Then the courts shut. From August 24 to 28, authorities suspended judicial services and closed and cordoned off court premises, which prevented legal challenges to the presidential result. Police called this an "intelligence-led and preventive measure" and gave no details. ^[1]

I spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent, and the order of those events is one I have seen before. First the people who watch the count are removed. Then the courts that could hear a complaint about the count are locked. Whatever follows may be technically legal, but by then there is little left to test.

Two stories about one night

The raid on Mundubile's home is where the official account falls apart, and it is the most urgent test.

Police at first denied that any raid had taken place. Police Inspector General Graphel Musamba later confirmed an operation at the home, saying a joint intelligence-led operation met "gunfire and resistance from unknown individuals" and that officers returned fire. ^[1] Human Rights Watch said public officials gave contradictory statements about the raid and about who was responsible. ^[1]

Kafwaya's whereabouts were not known until August 19, after his wife filed a habeas corpus petition, the old legal demand that the state produce a person it holds. ^[1] Mundubile later said in a High Court petition that he saw a military member fatally shoot Kafwaya. ^[1] That is an allegation, made by an interested party, and it should be treated as one.

The way to settle it is an investigation, and Human Rights Watch has called for one that is independent, impartial and thorough. ^[1]

Now set two official statements side by side. On August 15, Zambia's Information and Communications Technology Authority sent a message to registered phones warning of "false reports of shootings and abductions" and urging calm. The Ministry of Information called reports of the raid and the shooting "disinformation intended to alarm and mislead the public." ^[1]

A police chief then confirmed an operation at the home in which officers returned fire. The disinformation, it seems, was in the denial.

The government's best point

The government deserves a fair hearing, because it has a real argument. In response to a UN special rapporteur on freedom of assembly and association, who on September 2 called for the release of political detainees, Zambia's Foreign Affairs Ministry called the intervention "inaccurate, undiplomatic." It said opposition membership does not put a person beyond the law or turn a criminal suspect into a political detainee. ^[1]

That is correct as far as it goes. Belonging to an opposition party buys no immunity. If a person plotted violence, charge them, put the evidence before a judge and let the defence answer it. Nobody serious argues otherwise.

But the answer does not reach what is alleged. Treason charges can be tested in a courtroom. Broken bones, of the kind the monitors' lawyer described, cannot be defended as criminal procedure, and neither can eight days in which the police denied holding people whose whereabouts nobody knew.

A person held in a place the state will not name is outside the law, whatever the person is suspected of. And the government cannot cite the courts as the proper forum in a month when it locked them.

Making the quiet permanent

Then there is what happened after the arrests. On September 11, the government announced the cancellation of six critics' passports, including that of the academic Sishuwa Sishuwa, citing "security reasons." ^[1] Human Rights Watch also documented two cases in which relatives in Zambia of critics living abroad said government authorities harassed and threatened them. ^[1]

The passport cancellations and the visits to relatives are not about the election that has just passed. They are about the next one. They tell a critic that leaving is no escape, and that speaking from abroad has a price paid at home. The group says the intimidation has chilled civic and political organisations, and dissenting voices most of all. ^[1] My reading is that this is the aim: a country where people work out for themselves what it costs to organise, and decide not to.

Zambia is also due to serve on the UN Human Rights Council for the 2027 to 2029 term. ^[1] A government that wants a seat on the world's main human rights body can fairly be asked to produce its own record first.

Who answers

The questions are not hard to write down. How many people were arrested, how many are still held, and on what charges? Will an independent body, not the police and not the military, examine how Kafwaya died? Will investigators look up the chain of command, to whoever ordered the operations, and not stop at whoever pulled a trigger? Did the monitors freed in September get medical care, and can they bring complaints without fear?

Human Rights Watch asks the authorities to halt the crackdown, give detainees access to lawyers and medical care, release anyone arbitrarily held and ensure accountability. ^[1] None of that requires the government to concede that its election was unfair. It requires only that the state treat its own prisoners as people it must account for.

So watch three things. Whether the government publishes a count of detainees, which costs nothing and proves a good deal. Whether anyone in Lusaka, in the courts or the legislature, demands an inquiry into the raid that officials first denied and then half admitted. And whether Zambia's partners, who will soon see it take a seat on the Human Rights Council, say plainly that the two things do not fit together.

A quiet election is not the same as a free one. It is simply one in which fewer people were left able to say so.