The Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission (ZHRC) recently summoned the Airports Council of Zimbabwe (ACZ) to explain circumstances leading to three activists being forced off an aeroplane and tortured by suspected state agents.
In July last year, activists Namatai Kwekweza, Robson Chere and Samuel Gwenzi from a plane on the tarmac of the Robert Mugabe International Airport in Harare on their way to Victoria Falls to attend a conference.
The activists said they were held incommunicado, beaten and tortured for several hours before finally being taken to a police station on allegations that they had protested outside a court a month earlier over the arrests of supporters of the opposition leader Jameson Timba.
The ZHRC said it had launched its own investigations into alleged enforced disappearance, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment against the three activists.
“The ZHRC recently summoned the Airports Company of Zimbabwe as part of ongoing inquiries into serious human rights violations,” the commission confirmed last week.
“This follows allegations of the forcible removal of Namatai Kwekweza and others from a Fast Jet flight destined for Victoria Falls at Robert Mugabe International Airport.
“We are committed to ensuring accountability and protecting human rights for all!”
Reports last year showed that Kwekweza once failed to replace her national Identification document (ID) at the Civil Registry Department following her inclusion on the government’s “Stop List.”
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A Stop List are names of people deprived of particular rights, privileges, or services, or with whom members of an association are forbidden to do business.
The arrest of Kwekweza, Chere and Gwenzi attracted international condemnation with United Nations experts also calling out the government.
“The enforced disappearance, incommunicado detention and torture, followed by the arbitrary detention of these human rights defenders is inexcusable, and not only violates international human rights law, but also makes a mockery of the safeguards contained in Zimbabwe’s own Constitution,” UN experts said then.
A number of opposition supporters and activists were also arrested during the same period on charges of plotting protests to disrupt a Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit held in Harare in August last year.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said the arrests set a dangerous tone for Sadc's commitment to human rights under President Emmerson Mnangagwa's chairmanship.
Mnangagwa took over the rotational chairmanship of the regional bloc during the summit.
