On April 11, 2025, Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa signed a law on nongovernmental organizations that sharply curtails the rights to freedom of association and expression, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act empowers the government to deregister and seize the assets of nongovernmental groups deemed to be acting in a "politically partisan manner." The law will severely restrict civic space for groups that are fighting political repression in the country.
"Zimbabwean authorities have long used domestic law as an instrument of repression, and this new law will allow them to target civil groups," said Idriss Ali Nassah, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Nongovernmental organizations cannot freely exercise their rights to free expression and other democratic liberties when their very existence is under threat."
The new law allows the government to cancel the registration of organizations with little or no recourse to judicial review. Violations of the law could result in criminal prosecution, with penalties ranging from heavy fines to imprisonment. Officials also have extensive authority to monitor and control the operations of nongovernmental organizations, including scrutinizing their ownership structures, funding sources, and affiliations.
The government claimed that the law was needed to curb groups from financing terrorism and money laundering, and to comply with the recommendations of Zimbabwe's Financial Action Taskforce. Before signing the bill, President Mnangagwa said the law was needed to protect and defend the country's sovereignty from destabilizing foreign interests and to stop "the turning of a small section of mercenaries in our midst into the proverbial Trojan Horse for attacking our sovereignty, our values and our politics."
Domestic and international human rights and civil society organizations, including Human Rights Watch, urged Mnangagwa not to sign the bill because of its expected adverse effects on organizations involved in promoting democracy and the defense of human rights in Zimbabwe.
United Nations experts similarly urged Mnangagwa to reject the bill, saying that the law's restrictions "will have a chilling effect on civil society organizations, particularly dissenting voices."
When the senate passed the bill in October 2024, the nonprofit organization Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said the law "completely and wantonly disregards the provisions on association enunciated in the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights' Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly in Africa."
Mnangagwa has on several occasions threatened to expel groups that do not follow his government's policies or that intervene in the country's politics.
The Zimbabwean government has already sought to curtail the work of nongovernmental organizations in the country. On January 22, 2023, the authorities announced that they had revoked the registration of 291 nongovernmental and civil society organizations. The labor and social welfare minister said that registration was withdrawn because the groups allegedly failed to submit audited accounts for money raised from donors, for ostensible national security reasons, or for allegedly acting outside of their mandate.
Zimbabwe is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which uphold the rights to freedom of association and expression.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights Guidelines on Freedom of Association and Assembly provide that "[t]he oversight powers of the authorities shall be carefully delimited, so as not to infringe on the right to freedom of association." Furthermore, "[i]n no cases shall inspections be utilized in order to harass or intimidate associations of which political authorities disapprove."
Following the adoption of the law, the European Union announced that it had suspended its 2025 funding for the government's good governance initiatives under the "structured dialogue framework," because Zimbabwe had "not upheld its own commitments under this process, particularly regarding the expansion of civic space."
Zimbabwe has over US$21 billion in debt and arrears with bilateral and multilateral creditors, and the EU has been assisting the country in its debt resolution process. The process, which involves the United States and the African Development Bank, identified judicial independence, freedom of association and assembly, and civil society space as some of the areas that Zimbabwe needed to address to make progress in its debt resolution.
"The civil society law will further threaten the already compromised rights to freedom of association and expression in Zimbabwe," Nassah said. "Civil society groups shouldn't have to operate with the fear that they may be shut down and their staff criminally charged for simply doing their jobs."
