Zambia: Human Rights

THE Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has launched a newspaper, the Advocate, as an additional tool to advocate for media reforms, good governance and human rights in Zambia

About 80% of Zambian wives find it acceptable to be beaten by their husbands "as a form of chastisement", according to the latest Zambia Demographic Health Survey.

Two tireless women's rights champions, Maeza Ashenafi from Ethiopia and Sara Longwe from Zambia, have been awarded the 15th annual Africa Prize for Leadership, often referred to as the ”Nobel Prize for Africa.

The Afronet Zambia Human Rights Report provides the realities of human rights promotion, protection and enforcement, as monitored and verified in the year 2002. With specific reference to legal instruments that will enable the avid reader to make an informed follow up.

The catastrophe of HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) in Africa, which has already claimed over 18 million lives on that continent, has hit girls and women harder than boys and men. In many countries of eastern and southern Africa, HIV prevalence among girls under age eighteen is four to seven times higher than among boys the same age, an unusual disparity that means more deaths among women than men. Abuses of the human rights of girls, especially sexual violence and other sexual abuse, contribute directly to this disparity in infection and mortality. In Zambia, as in other countries in the region, tens of thousands of girls-many orphaned by AIDS or otherwise without parental care-suffer in silence as the government fails to provide basic protections from sexual assault that would lessen their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

Zambia's First Lady, Maureen Mwanawasa, has called for castration of child defilers, to curb the the unusually high is incident of incest and child defilement cases in Zambia.