On April 11, 2025, President of Zimbabwe 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 organisations 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 organisations, including scrutinising their ownership structures, funding sources, and affiliations.
The government claimed the law curbs groups from financing terrorism and money laundering and complies with Zimbabwe’s Financial Action Taskforce recommendations. Before he signed the bill, President Mnangagwa said the law protects the country’s sovereignty from destabilising foreign interests and attacks.
Domestic and international human rights and civil society organisations, including Human Rights Watch, urged Mnangagwa not to sign the bill because of its expected adverse effects on organisations involved in promoting democracy and the defence 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 organisations, 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 organisations. The labour and social welfare minister withdrew the groups’ registration, alleging they failed to submit audited donor accounts or exceeded 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 carefully delimit authorities’ oversight powers to protect freedom of association. They also state, “[i]n no cases shall inspections be utilised 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€18.39 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.”
