5 May 2005
Maputo — Currently, the main human rights problem in Mozambique lies, not with the police, but with the courts, declared Alice Mabota, chairperson of the Mozambican Human Rights League (LDH), in Maputo on Thursday.
Mabota was speaking on the 10th anniversary of the LDH's creation, at a ceremony which also served to launch the overdue LDH report on human rights for 2003.
She attacked "the incapacity of the justice system", and the unaccountability of judges. "Citizens are not informed about the courts, because they give no account of their activities", Mabota said. "The courts need to be accountable to citizens".
Mabota said that "the incapacity and degradation of the state's authority are the main factors behind insecurity, anarchy and mistrust, fomenting the acts of violence and the trend for people to take the law into their own hands that we see in almost the entire country".
She warned that "many citizens are still arbitrarily detained", with cases where state agents carry out clandestine executions of prisoners "The situation in the prisons remains worrying", she said, "will overcrowding, ill-treatment of inmates, and failure to comply with the time limits for preventive detention".
Mabota recognised that the government has been making a serious effort to reform the public sector, but urged that the fight against corruption "must move from words to deeds".
"All will be lost for this generation, if it only knows how to solve its problems through acts of corruption", she declared.
She noted that at the start of the League's work "partnership with official institutions was difficult, because they saw the question of human rights as a great affront to the state's authority. But today ever larger numbers of citizens are speaking about human rights, in a clear demonstration that a human rights culture is sinking roots in our society".
Justice Minister Esperanca Machavela accepted that in the past the government's relationship with human rights activists had bene poor. "When we heard Alice Mabota's voice, we almost used to put our hands over our ears - we didn't want to listen", she said.
"It's not our legislation that's at fault - it's our behaviour", the minister continued. "The government has to ensure that its employees adopt a culture of human rights".
Machavela did not want to see any prison official, policeman or court violating citizens' rights. "Our objective is the physical and spiritual well-being of our citizens", she declared.
"That's why we set up this Republic".
Reform of the courts, she believed, depended on the work of the Legal and Judicial Training Centre, run by Supreme Court judge Joao Trindade. The training of new judges "is where we must begin".
Machavela hoped that judges would show "greater sensitivity" and would "go beyond the letter of the law, and understand the spirit of the law, which is to defend human rights".
The Minister agreed with Mabota that a National Human Rights Commission should be set up, and told the ceremony she hopes a bill from the government to set up such a body will go before the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, before the end of this year.
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