A Human Rights Approach to Fighting COVID-19 in Zimbabwe
The Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) welcomes with great appreciation the Policy brief released by the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and urges the government of Zimbabwe to observed the key human rights principles outlined in the fight against COVID-19.
On 23 April 2020, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres released a Policy Brief titled, ‘COVID-19 and Human Rights: We are all in this together.’ In this policy brief, the Secretary General confronts a very important question: Why are human rights so important to the COVID-19 response? In answering this question, the Secretary General offers six key messages which must underline responses to COVID-19. Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, ZimRights has been documenting community responses to COVID-19 measures. In this report, ZimRights looks at the Secretary General’s key messages in the light of community experiences of the COVID19 measures. The recommendations carried in this report are derived from the documented experiences of the Zimbabwean communities as reported in a series titled, ‘Their Voices Matter: Community Responses to COVID-19 measures in Zimbabwe.’
ZimRights, being Zimbabwe’s biggest indigenous grassroots movement, associates itself fully with the standards laid down by the United Nations and affirms the need to ensure that human rights remain at the centre of the fight against COVID 19.
