Pursuing justice, one courtroom at a time


By Kate Heartfield, The Ottawa Citizen - December 16, 2008

The world needs more lawyers. Really. Or at least, it needs more lawyers like Irene Petras and Andrew Makoni, who fight for human rights from their offices on Nelson Mandela Avenue in Harare.

Their organization, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, goes to court to fight for human rights activists and other victims of state terrorism. They plan to start litigating soon on behalf of the victims of the cholera outbreak -- as soon as they get home from their visit to Canada.

Mr. Makoni and Ms. Petras were here last week to accept the John Humphrey Freedom Award, given to Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights from the Canadian organization Rights and Democracy.

When people in countries like Zimbabwe or Burma stand and fight, they often have lawyers standing beside them. And the remarkable thing is that often, they win. It's hard for even the most brutal tyrannies to control everything that happens in a judicial system, especially in the lower courts.

In 2003, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights started providing legal support for human rights defenders and other victims of state harassment. In five years, in which they responded to 3,000 arrests and attacks, they have yet to lose a single case. Every battle is wearying. When the judges can't see a way to deny justice, they delay it. If the lawyers go to court to fight a detention order, and it takes several days to get the victim released, the victim will likely have been tortured in the meantime.

Human-rights lawyers in countries like Zimbabwe risk their careers and their lives. Still, the victories count. Where there are lawyers, there are opportunities for citizens to challenge their government. One of the most important changes for the better in China in the 1980s was the emergence of private law practices.

The leaders of the most powerful countries in the world have been unable to hold Robert Mugabe to account for this month's cholera outbreak. They have thundered for him to go, and he has thundered right back.

What Gordon Brown and George W. Bush cannot do, Andrew Makoni and Irene Petras can. They and their colleagues can hold the government of Zimbabwe to account for its reckless neglect that led directly to the deaths of still-unnumbered children by a preventable and treatable disease.

Canada can help them do that, by giving Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights whatever financial, moral and operational support they need.

There are other things Canada can do to help the cholera victims, too. It's easy to thunder about Mugabe -- I do it all the time -- but that doesn't absolve us of the responsibility to get help now to the people of Zimbabwe.

Liberal MP Keith Martin, a physician who has long taken an interest in the plight of Zimbabwe, has some practical ideas. Canada can get medical supplies directly to hospitals in Zimbabwe, through Health Partners International of Canada. The Canadian Physician Overseas Programme can send medical professionals. And Engineers Without Borders can help Zimbabweans rebuild their water-supply system.

Excellent ideas all, and I urge other MPs to join Dr. Martin in pushing the government to lead this effort.

The other task for Canada's government is to communicate frankly with South Africa, the one country that stands a chance of influencing Robert Mugabe. Jacob Zuma, head of South Africa's ruling party, has conspicuously not called for Mugabe to resign during the cholera crisis, saying there must be a chance for the power-sharing deal between Mugabe and the opposition to work.

South Africa will have to make it work. Mugabe's not going to budge an inch unless he's forced. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights stands ready to help the government reform its institutions. But Mugabe needs a push from outside. And South Africa can't afford to watch as Zimbabwe's refugees cross the border, bringing cholera with them.

South Africa's own struggle for political change took place not only in the townships, but also in the courtrooms. Some of the 20th century's great human-rights defenders began as lawyers in apartheid South Africa, including Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

In 1990, Mr. Mandela came to Ottawa and said, "As an expression of humanity, and not as an act of charity, we ask you to walk the last mile with us."

South Africa has yet to cross that last mile. It has yet to become the rainbow nation, the beacon of freedom for an entire continent, that it promised to be. It cannot become that until it deals with the Mugabe problem. It needs Canada's friendship now, just as much as it needed it 20 years ago. Sometimes, friends have to tell friends to shape up.