The Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) has filed an urgent High Court application seeking to compel the Government to provide a COVID-19 National Vaccination Deployment Plan.
The application comes at a time President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced that the country will vaccinate more than 60 percent of the population with the first phase targeting frontline health workers, the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions.
“Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) has filed an urgent chamber application at the High Court seeking to compel the Government to provide a COVID-19 National Vaccination Deployment Plan and the accompanying budget in the face of the ravaging pandemic that has killed over two million people worldwide and over 1200 in Zimbabwe. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 at ZimRights we have always called upon the government to ensure human rights are at the centre of the fight against COVID-19,” said ZimRights.
The human rights pressure group says it has operationalized a COVID-19 response strategy that is premised on three pillars namely humanitarian response, human rights monitoring and policy advocacy pillar.
“It is under the third pillar (policy advocacy) that ZimRights now seeks to compel the Government of Zimbabwe to take positive steps to stop the spread of the virus as other governments are doing. At a time when governments the world over are investing in measures to protect their populations, the Government of Zimbabwe has been investing in destroying people’s homes and informal markets while ignoring the most urgent task of saving lives,”
ZimRights says in the founding affidavit filed on behalf of the lobby group by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, the ZimRights Director Dzikamai Bere states that section 29 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe obliges the State to take all practical measures to ensure the provision of basic accessible and adequate health service throughout Zimbabwe.
He adds “Section 29 (3) in particular obliges the State to take all preventive measures within the limits of the resources available to it, including education and public awareness programmes against the spread of diseases. Section 76 obliges the State to take reasonable legislative and other measures within the limits of the resources available to it, to achieve the progressive realisation of the right to health care.”
