Tanzania is missing out in the Human Rights Watch 2015 world report published on Wednesday this week.
The country is not among 90 nations included in the global survey which summarizes key human rights issues in those countries and territories, drawing on events from the end of 2014 through November 2015.
However, an advocate with the Legal and Human Rights Center (LHRC), Harold Sungusia was quick to point reasons why Tanzania was not included in the appraisal.
He said Human Rights Watch did not have a chapter in the country, and that it was not easy for the watchdog agency to compile and document human rights violations in the country.
“If they had an office in the country then Tanzania would have been among the 90 nations in the Human Rights index,” he told The Guardian yesterday.
Sungusia stated that LHRC filed comprehensive reports on human rights violations in the country that would have still been used by the organization, as Tanzania was not free from human rights violations.
Recently, the Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance (CHRGG) and a number of lawyers condemned the government’s move to limit live coverage of sessions of the National Assembly and the chaotic manner police were ordered to throw out opposition MPs on Wednesday. Child labor still remains a critical issue in Tanzania where poverty drives many children into child labor, he declared.
While the government launched an ambitious National Action Plan on Elimination of Child Labor in 2009, the plan was not implemented, and labor inspectors rarely visit small-scale mines for child labor.
Child marriages are another pernicious issue where women and girls face discrimination in law and practice, and high levels of sexual and domestic violence.
According to the 2010 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey one in two married women aged 15−49 reported having experienced emotional, physical, and sexual violence at the hands of their current or former husbands.
C-Sema, a firm operating a child helpline in Tanzania says although rates of child marriage had decreased, the number of girls marrying remains high. Four out of 10 girls are married before their eighteenth birthday while some girls are as young as seven when they are married.
The Human Rights Watch 2015 report rates Burundi as the worst case of human rights violations in 2015. It points out government crackdown on free expression as part of a political and human rights crisis involving the closure of Burundi's four most popular private radio stations and a suspension ofactivities and bank accounts of 10 independent organizations.
"But key regional powers like Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya also failed to make progress on core human rights issues, including torture and killings by their security forces," said HRW Africa director Daniel Bekele.
The report also points out acute violations on the part of Al-Shabaab. HRW says the Somalia-based militants killed at least 226 unarmed people in Kenya between November 2014 and July of last year.
Failure by Kenya to respond to allegations of killings and enforced disappearances on the part of security forces had worsened in the wake of April attack against students at Garissa University College in which 148 people perished.
It also highlights the deterioration of human rights observation in the country.
Uganda was not spared either, as the report focused on intimidation and threats against journalists and activists as having increased in Uganda in the run-up to elections scheduled for next month.
Rwanda maintained tight control on dissenting views in a year that saw President Paul Kagame move to extend his 16-year-long grip on power, the report intoned.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
No comments:
Post a Comment