Advancing Rights in Southern Africa

As a group, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states have seen a slow but steady 10-year decline in human rights and democracy. Restrictive legislation and policies throughout the SADC region have eroded the environment for the protection of human rights, including laws targeting freedoms of association, assembly, and expression and the criminalization of the work of human rights defenders and civil society organizations (CSOs). The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative’s (ABA ROLI) Advancing Rights in Southern Africa (ARISA) program worked to improve the recognition, awareness, and enforcement of human rights in the SADC region through development of training sessions with lawyers and paralegals, strategic litigation, tools for judicial officials, and impactful reporting. The program specifically focused on indigenous peoples’ rights, women’s customary land rights, media freedoms and digital rights, and the Angolan elections.

Over five years, between 2018 and 2023, ABA ROLI’s work across seven countries in Southern Africa—Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa— supporting nearly 80 cases with courts or decision-making bodies and twelve organizations with subgrants. 

The program’s final calendar year included the culmination of work over the grant period: 

• General support to human rights and human rights defenders. In 2023, ABA ROLI delivered a training workshop to lawyer and paralegal teams from partner organizations across the five-year program on paralegalism, equipping local CSOs with skills for human rights litigation in Southern Africa. In June, ABA ROLI held a trial observation training for human rights defenders from Angola and Mozambique. The Southern African Human Rights Defenders’ Network launched a social media platform as part of this project, providing a space for regional human rights defenders to share resources and support each other.
• Angolan elections. ABA ROLI, with Associação Mãos Livres and the Angola Bar Association, created an observation report for the August 2022 national elections in Angola and filed five cases related to the elections. An ABA ROLI-trained individual from Lubango Province shared electoral litigation training with the Provincial Bar Association and applied the skills in an electoral case. ABA ROLI also provided election rights training to lawyers and CSOs, marking the first targeted training on electoral rights litigation in Angola.
• Women’s customary land rights. ARISA-supported subgrantees have made strides for women’s land rights, notably in Lesotho, where Seinoli Legal Centre and FIDA filed cases and raised concerns before South Africa's Parliament and the African Development Bank about the Lesotho Highlands Water Project’s impact on women. FIDA also submitted a report to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women regarding constitutional discrimination in Lesotho. ABA ROLI supported Women and Law in Southern Africa – Lesotho Chapter in challenging inheritance laws favoring male primogeniture.
• Indigenous peoples’ rights. In 2023, ARISA published reports on rural Mozambican women's land rights in the context of the proposed National Land Policy, and on similar issues in Eswatini. ABA ROLI subgrantees filed cases, produced reports on indigenous peoples' sexual and reproductive health rights in Namibia, developed guidance on managing community property associations in South Africa, and expanded training for indigenous rights advocates.
• Media freedoms and digital rights. Following the 2022 Judicial Symposium on Digitization in Nairobi, ABA ROLI created a bench book on computer and cybercrimes, validated through a 2023 workshop with judges from the region. ABA ROLI's Deputy Chief of Party highlighted ongoing digital rights work at the Southern and East Africa Chief Justices’ Forum in October. The bench book provides a vital resource for judges handling digital rights cases.