Civil society submission to the APRM in Zimbabwe

In addition, a raft of concerns exist about the conduct of Zimbabwean politics and the adherence of the state and some other actors to the demands of the Constitution. [...] In continuing with the culture of the Mugabe regime, Mnangagwa’s administration had maintained the same overweening Executive as well as blurred lines between the Executive and the Judiciary on one hand, and the Executive and the Legislature on the other. [...] Section 328 (3) of the Constitution stipulates that a Constitutional Amendment Bill may not be presented in either the Senate or the House of Assembly ‘...unless the Speaker has given at least ninety days notice in the Gazette of the precise terms of the Bill’ (emphasis added).48 The point of the 90-day requirement is to give members of the public an opportunity to discuss and debate the bill befo. [...] The president’s discretion was limited to choosing a candidate from the list.50 However, a new subsection (4a) now gives the president the power, acting on the recommendation of the JSC, to ‘...appoint a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, High Court, Labour Court or Administrative Court to be a judge of the next higher court.’ 51 This is disturbing because it dilutes the independence of the Judic. [...] Source: The Inter-Ministerial Task Force on the Alignment of Legislation to the Constitution (IMT), The IMT Quarterly Brief (Harare: IMT, 2021) Legislation enacting all five of the independent commissions in Chapter 12 of the Constitution – the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission, the Zimbabwe Gender Commission (ZGC), the Zimbabwe Media Commission and the National P.