Report blasts Eswatini for stifling freedoms
MBABANE – Eswatini has been criticised for allegedly violating legal provisions on freedom of association and assembly.
According to Human Rights Watch 2023, the Public Order Act of 2017 protects the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, but with limitations, which the government has been using to restrict freedoms.
Human Rights Watch is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that investigates and reports on abuses happening in the world. It consists of roughly 550 people of more than 70 nationalities, who are country experts, lawyers and journalists working to protect people that are at risk.
The organisation found that the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and queer, intersexual (LGBTQI+) people were not observed. They cited the High Court of Eswatini ruling in which, on April 29, 2022, in the case of Melusi Simelane and others versus the Minister of Commerce Industry and Trade and others. The ruling was that while LGBTQI+ people were entitled to all the relevant rights conferred under the Constitution because they were human beings, those rights were subject to other laws of Eswatini.
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The court went on to uphold the refusal of the registrar of companies to register an LGBTQI+ organisation, Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities, because the criminalisation of sodomy under the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act rendered the purpose of the organisation unlawful.
The matter is currently pending in the Supreme Court of Eswatini.
The report further revealed that during its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), several States made recommendations that Eswatini should take steps to decriminalise same-sex conduct, and to adopt legislation to give effect to LGBTQI+ rights.
Meanwhile, the report indicated that Reporters Without Borders, in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index ranked Eswatini 131 out of 180 countries, alleging that the country prevented journalists from working freely and independently by maintaining total control over the broadcast media, infiltrating the newsroom, and spying on, arresting and harassing journalists.
Furthermore, women in Eswatini have been found to be under-represented in leadership and decision-making positions in both public and private sectors. This was despite the provisions of the 2018 Election of Women Act, and the constitutional requirement of 30 per cent representation quotas for women and marginalised groups in Parliament.
According to Human Rights Watch, Eswatini has yet to ratify the Protocol of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, which provided, among other things, for the protection of women from harmful practices.
“Eswatini has a dual legal system, whereby the common law, based on Roman Dutch Law, operates side-by-side with unwritten customary laws under which women are treated as dependents of their fathers, husbands, and traditional chiefs,” reads the report.
Human Rights Watch has also stated that government proposed two notable Bills to Parliament, which are the Marriages Bill and the Matrimonial Properties Bill, which seek to address some of those inconsistencies.
The proposed Bills include provisions to abolish marital power held by husbands over their wives’ ability to contract and to litigate, as well as provisions for the equitable distribution and equal access of spouses to matrimonial property.