"The vendor who changed Malawi: Mayeso Gwanda took the state to court after his arrest for an outdated and vague petty crime. While he was successful in changing the law, the African Union is calling for more to be done. Enforcing these sorts of minor offences leads to lifelong consequences...

https://youtu.be/k2lj7PYx86s As part of their activities under the Campaign to Decriminalise Petty Offences in Africa, the Organisation against Torture in Tunisia (OCTT) has launched an media campaign to raise the awareness of the public and the policymakers about the necessity to stop criminalizing the minor offences that target poor and...

Throughout the globe, petty offenses, such as loitering laws, are used to exert social control. They criminalize poverty and marginalization and police gender norms. In the United States and locally in Miami, the use of petty offenses to criminalize poverty is also a critical issue where people experiencing homelessness regularly...

Regional High Level Consultation Dialogue Report on Implementation and Domestication of AU Standards to Decriminalize Petty Offences SADC Lawyers Association’s primary mandate is to promote good governance & the rule of law in the SADC region. There has been prevalent existence and application of petty offenses in the region &...

Africa.com 22 January 2021 By Anneke Meerkotter On 4 December 2020, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights issued an Advisory Opinion which challenges the very notions which underpin our class-based societies. The African Court stated that there is no reasonable basis for a law which distinguishes between so-called...

To promote constitutionally compliant legislation, in the past 27 years, South Africa’s policy and legislative environment has been a subject of sustained and progressive reform. However, across all nine provinces, laws still exist that criminalise the status of individuals, and penalise the performance of life-sustaining activities in the public places, effectively...

Recently, the Organization Against Torture in Tunisia organised an experts seminar, as part of this campaign's activities. The seminar was held in a hotel in Hammamet on March 20 and 21, 2021. The general objective of this conference was to raise awareness among Tunisia's civil society and judicial authorities about...

68th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights  14 April – 4 May 2021  Dear Hon. Chairperson, Hon. Commissioners, all protocols observed. The Centre for Human Rights Education, Advice and Assistance (CHREAA), welcomes the opportunity to respond to the activity report of the Special Rapporteur on...

The quarterly digest of petty offences campaign activities for November 2020 to February 2021 is in three languages, English, Portuguese and French.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism25 November 2020 Edward was lying on his bed when he heard shouting and banging. Last night had been fun: he’d hosted some friends at the LGBTQ+ homeless shelter where he lives and they had stayed up late, talking and drinking. As he pulled on his...

https://youtu.be/lUIqiZJJMlk The Legal Resources Foundation, Southern Africa Litigation Centre, Prisoners Reintergration and Empowerment Organisation and Decisive Minds put together a documentary on prison conditions in Zambia and the urgent need to decongest prisons. The documentary was published on Diamond TV Zambia.

The NationBy James Chavula27 January 2021 In 2017, a vendor moved the Constitutional Court to scrape a colonial law made by Britain in 1924 that empowered police to extort bribes from the poor and exert excess force on people they do not like. Now the adoption of coronavirus prevention rules...

Daily MaverickAbdirahman Maalim Gossar13 December 2020 In a watershed judgment, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights has ruled that vague, outdated colonial-era laws, like those that outlaw being idle or disorderly, are a violation of human rights as embodied in the African Charter. On Sunday, 19 March 2019,...

The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, in its 59th Ordinary Session, has today declared that vagrancy laws as contained in national laws are in breach of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (African Charter), Children's Rights Charter, and Women's Rights Protocol (Maputo Protocol). The Court further...

Lawyers Alert in partnership with Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) released petty offences violations data report for Nigeria. The data is captured using its online tool and is continuously analyzed across ages, locations, types, and trends. It serves as an advocacy tool and for tailored program interventions. The...

The Mail & Guardian On 29 June this year, amid the generalized panic and concern about rising Covid-19 infection and police brutality both locally and globally, the Johannesburg High Court, in Johannesburg, issued a judgement with potentially major implications for the future of policing in Johannesburg and South Africa more...

The ElephantBy Patrick Gathara Kenyan prisons today carry the DNA of their forebears – the colonial prisons and Mau Mau detention camps. They are about brutalising prisoners into submission and scaring the rest of society into compliance with the state. And like their colonial predecessors, they are also sites of...

In September 2020, the Regional Campaign to Decriminalise Petty Offences hosted a virtual conference entitled Policing Pandemics, Balancing Rights. The conference communique and recordings of the conference are available online, for 14 September 2020, 15 September 2020, and 16 September 2020. Snippets from some of the conference presentations are included in this newsletter. Find the...

Regional Campaign partners remain deeply concerned about the criminalisation of poverty across our continent. It is critical that the Principles on the Decriminalisation of Petty Offences are implemented by all States. The global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the enactment of legislative and regulatory instruments to curb the spread of...

The Daily Maverick First published by GroundUp The global “war on drugs” has failed. The decades during which it has been waged have inflicted devastating consequences on societies in both hemispheres. These are no longer fringe advocacy assertions. They are an increasingly obvious truth. A series of authoritative international reports has documented...

The Guardian Human rights campaigners in Malawi are calling on the government to urgently release people from its notoriously overcrowded prisons as cases of Covid-19 are rising among both staff and inmates. Currently, 86 inmates and 21 members of staff have tested positive for Covid-19, according to the Malawi prison...

Progressive International Women’s imprisonment is closely related to poverty: women are in debt because they are poor and cannot afford basic life expenses, and their experiences are worsened because they often cannot afford legal services, fines, or bail. Because people are unaware of their legal rights and because of outdated...

The Nigerian Voice Data on human rights abuse associated with petty offences in Nigeria covering the period October 2019 and March 2020 have been released by Lawyers Alert. The Data detailing the analysis of human rights violations based on types of petty offences is with a view to serving as...

Business Tech The Department of Justice and Correctional Services is currently working on new legislation which will stop admission of guilt fines attracting criminal records in South Africas, says deputy minister John Jefferies. Jefferies made the announcement in a parliamentary briefing on Monday (18 May) after opposition parties raised concerns...

The Citizen Forced to choose between hunger and breaching the lockdown regulations, two waste pickers chose the latter – and wound up behind bars for three months. Now, the North Gauteng High Court has ordered the men’s immediate release and slammed the authorities for the “absolutely unacceptable” way in which...

Over 163,000 people are in correctional facilities in South Africa. Outbreaks of Covid-19 in these prisons can have catastrophic consequences for both prisoners and the public healthcare system. This article by ACJR's Lukas Muntingh was published by Spotlight and Daily Maverick. One need not be an expert in public health...

Amnesty International In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, prisons are overcrowded. Prisoners often live in squalid conditions and the healthcare systems inside prisons are extremely poor. The coronavirus pandemic makes detainees particularly vulnerable and at risk. COVID-19 calls for states to quickly solve issues regarding their detention system to avoid...

AllAfrica Minister of homeland security, Richard Chimwendo Banda , acknowledged that the situation in the the country's prisons over Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is deteriorating because of overcrowding. Chimwendo Banda said this as Covid-19 cases has increased among both staff and inmates. He said a special presidential committee to look into...

The Regional Campaign to Decriminalise Petty Offences has long argued for a change in police arrest practices and increased accountability of law enforcement agencies. Deprose Muchena, the Director of Amnesty International’s Southern Africa office, writes that the brutal killing of George Floyd has resonated in Africa, highlighting the long-standing problem of...

The Mail & Guardian By Sean Tait On April 10, Collins Khosa was allegedly assaulted by members of the South African National Defence Force and the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department. Khosa died as a result of what appears to have been grossly overzealous enforcement of the Covid-19 state of national...

The Weekend Nation By Victor Mhango from the Centre for Human Rights Education, Advice and Assistance (CHREAA) and Anneke Meerkotter and Chikondi Chijozi from the Southern Africa Litigation Centre SALC) Malawi’s 2020 Public Health (Corona Virus Prevention, Containment and Management) Rules, prescribes what must happen if and when a lockdown takes...

The Daily Maverick In the wake of the controversy surrounding a video of Cape Town resident Bulelani Qolani being dragged naked from his shack by municipal police, is it not time for a complete overhaul of police oversight mechanisms, and for Ipid to take control? A video in which the City...

GENEVA (2 July 2020) — The UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) has called for the role of domestic monitoring bodies, officially known as National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs), to be strengthened, highlighting the importance of monitoring the conditions of people deprived of liberty in critical situations such as the current COVID-19 pandemic....