When Geneva Becomes a Crime: The Shrinking Space for Rights Advocacy in Zimbabwe
Blessed Mhlanga's potential prosecution for addressing international human rights forums exposes the widening chasm between Zimbabwe's international commitments and its domestic suppression of dissent.
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The Palais des Nations in Geneva stands as a monument to multilateral diplomacy, its marbled halls echoing with the measured language of international human rights law. For decades, it has served as sanctuary for voices silenced in their homelands. But for Blessed Mhlanga, a Zimbabwean citizen facing potential legal consequences after speaking at such forums, the distance between Switzerland's pristine diplomatic quarter and Harare's charged political atmosphere has collapsed entirely.
Mhlanga's predicament crystallizes a paradox at the heart of Zimbabwe's relationship with international human rights architecture. While the government maintains formal participation in United Nations mechanisms—submitting periodic reports, hosting special rapporteurs, and signing conventions—citizens who engage with these same institutions face criminalisation at home. The message is unmistakable: international human rights spaces exist for state performance, not citizen participation.
The Price of International Testimony
According to Nehanda Radio, Mhlanga's case illustrates how Geneva's forums have become sites of risk rather than refuge for Zimbabwean activists. "It is a space designed for the clinical examination of state conduct," the outlet reported, yet "for a Zimbabwean citizen like Blessed Mhlanga, the distance between the pristine halls of the Palais des Nations and the humid, tense political climate of Harare is non-existent." This collapse of geographical and legal distance represents a deliberate strategy to extend state surveillance and punishment beyond national borders.
The charges Mhlanga potentially faces remain unclear, but the pattern is familiar. Zimbabwe's security apparatus has increasingly deployed vaguely worded statutes—provisions against "undermining the authority of or insulting the President," "communicating falsehoods prejudicial to the State," or violating the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act—to prosecute citizens whose only offence is speaking truth to power in international forums. These laws, inherited from colonial-era legislation and expanded under successive post-independence governments, create elastic definitions of criminality that can ensnare any form of dissent.
A Chilling Effect on Advocacy
The targeting of individuals who engage with UN mechanisms produces consequences far beyond single prosecutions. Human rights defenders across Zimbabwe now calculate the cost of international advocacy against the certainty of domestic reprisal. Organisations report declining willingness among victims to testify at Universal Periodic Review sessions or to brief special mandate holders. The chilling effect extends to lawyers, journalists, and civil society workers who might otherwise document abuses or facilitate international engagement.
This strategy of criminalising international advocacy serves multiple state objectives. It isolates domestic activists from solidarity networks and technical support available through international human rights institutions. It signals to foreign governments and multilateral bodies that engagement with Zimbabwean civil society carries costs for those citizens. And it transforms the act of claiming rights—theoretically universal and inalienable—into evidence of criminal intent.
Zimbabwe's constitution, adopted in 2013 following a referendum, contains a Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Section 61 explicitly protects the right to petition international bodies. Yet constitutional protections have proven worthless when confronted with a security apparatus that operates with impunity and a judiciary that has been systematically captured. The gap between constitutional text and lived reality has become a canyon.
International Complicity Through Silence
The international community's response to cases like Mhlanga's has been tepid at best. While UN special rapporteurs occasionally issue statements of concern, these rarely translate into meaningful pressure on Harare. Diplomatic engagement continues largely unchanged, with Western governments maintaining a careful balance between human rights rhetoric and economic pragmatism. The African Union, which could leverage regional mechanisms to address systematic repression, has remained largely silent on Zimbabwe's deteriorating rights environment.
This silence carries its own message. When states face no consequences for criminalising citizens who engage with international human rights mechanisms, those mechanisms lose credibility. The Universal Periodic Review becomes theatre. Special rapporteur visits become photo opportunities. The entire architecture of international human rights law risks becoming a hollow shell—impressive in design, empty in substance.
For Blessed Mhlanga, the immediate concern is avoiding prosecution, imprisonment, or worse. But his case raises questions that extend far beyond individual jeopardy. Can international human rights institutions protect those who engage with them? What value do universal rights hold when claiming them becomes criminal? How long can the fiction be maintained that Zimbabwe respects international obligations while systematically punishing citizens who attempt to hold it accountable?
The answers will emerge not in Geneva's conference rooms but in Harare's courts and police stations, where the actual cost of speaking truth continues to be extracted from those brave or desperate enough to try. Until that changes, the pristine halls of the Palais des Nations will remain what they have become: a beautiful, distant, and ultimately dangerous illusion for Zimbabweans seeking justice.