Page 27 - OSISA Annual Report 2015-2018

This has included responding to situations happening in Zimbabwe and Lesotho where we had to support 59 soldiers who were charged with mutiny after refusing to execute an unlawful order. Responding directly to these situations has been time and resource-intensive. This made us double efforts to establish a fully functional and well-resourced Southern Africa Human Rights Defenders Network.
Disability Rights
The focal programme under Disability Rights has been the support given to several Universities in the region to enable them to introduce Disability Rights into their law curricula. This was part of a more extensive Open Society driven programme which was simultaneously being rolled out in various universities in several regions globally.
This programme included supporting lecturers in these universities to undergo training under various Masters Programmes on disability rights. Universities that benefited through this programme included the University of Zambia, Chancellor College in Malawi, Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, Midlands University in Zimbabwe and the University of Botswana.
During this period, OSISA supported various partners’ attendance at the University of Ireland’s Galway Disability Summer School. This was an excellent opportunity for disability rights activists, scholars, government leaders, among others, to get a sense of global trends on the disability movement in a space that is attended to and addressed by leading policy and thought leaders.
Equality and non-discrimination
LGBTQI rights
In July 2014, Solicitor General Janet Banda told the UN Human Rights Commission that Malawi’s government would not enforce same-sex laws. On 19 December 2015, Minister of Justice Samuel Tembenu reaffirmed the moratorium on enforcing laws criminalising consensual same-sex sexual activity. In the year following the introduction of Section 137A, the government introduced a suspension on arrests under the Unnatural Offences Articles. However, as widely reported, two biological men
were arrested (filed under ‘sodomy’) in December 2015, which led to a reaffirmation of the moratorium.
In 2016 OSISA and SALC assisted our local grantee, the Centre for the Development of People, to secure lawyers that eventually saw the case being thrown out of court. In March 2016, the Botswana Court of Appeal ruled that the government’s refusal to register an LGBT organisation was unconstitutional. The court confirmed that human rights are universal and that the rights in the constitution applied to every person. This was a huge victory for LEGABIBO and the regional LGBTQI movement.
In 2017 OSISA co-hosted the 2nd OSF Global Decriminal- isation Conference in Swakopmund, Namibia. Following an extended site visit and seeing the mobilisation of young self-identified LGBT persons, OSISA decided that exposure to the OSF Global Decriminalisation Conference and a day-long, fully funded national conversation with 54 LGBT activists from across the country would catalyse into a movement to push for decriminalisation in Namibia. This has indeed been the case, with the Diversity Alliance of Namibia (DAN) being formed to provide that unified voice.
Indigenous People’s Rights (IPR)
The IPR Programme, together with the Education Programme in OSISA, focussed on getting San children not only to go to school but to start their schooling at a reasonable age. They also worked on the formulation of effective empowering and enabling policies, programmes and strategies to ameliorate the educational challenges facing the San. After Namibia gained independence in 1990, the government redistributed some of its land to various expropriated groups. The IPR Programme, together with the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), delved into this complex history. They argued that the decision by the Hai//om in 2016 to file a collective action lawsuit against the government of Namibia over Etosha and Mangetti West must be seen in a context of ongoing, often subtle, processes of land dispossession simultaneously taking place as a result of marginalisation and structural disempowerment. This case is still ongoing and will set a fundamental precedent if successful.
OPEN SOCIETY INITIATIVE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICA – 2017 REPORT
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