Fellowship Year:
2006-2007
Host University:
University of Minnesota
World Region:
Africa (Sub-Saharan)
Country:
Zimbabwe
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Arnold
Tsunga - Zimbabwe
After a harrowing day in March 2002, on the eve
of the re-election of President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean lawyer
Arnold Tsunga dedicated himself to defending human rights.
Tsunga
had traveled that day with several election observers to a rural
part of the country to represent 150 people who he says had been
arrested arbitrarily. On the way, a group of about 20 armed soldiers
ambushed Tsunga’s group and beat and questioned
them for several hours in what Tsunga believes was an effort to
intimidate the locals. “The lesson was, if you do not vote
for retaining Robert Mugabe in power, then there was going to be
war,” he says.
Shortly after, he resigned as a partner in
a successful legal practice and became the founding executive director
of the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. The organization assembled
lawyers from across the country to do pro-bono work for human rights
defenders and political candidates. It also opened a hotline for
human rights workers targeted by the government, sending a lawyer
within half an hour to a scene of abuse, thereby preventing torture,
solitary confinement, and false confessions, Tsunga says.
Soon
after its founding, however, the organization itself became a government
target. State forces began beating lawyers and ransacking their
offices. Tsunga discovered that the state had targeted him for
assassination.
With his life in danger, he applied for the Humphrey
Fellowship both to leave Zimbabwe and for professional development.
Tsunga traveled to the University of Minnesota in 2006 to study
human rights law at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public
Affairs.
“In Zimbabwe I was operating in a crisis mode. The regime sets the agenda,” Tsunga
says. “In Minnesota I was able to go through the process of sharing experiences,
and making academic associations and professional mentorships.”
Tsunga also became fascinated with how the United
States had overcome conflict from the Revolutionary War to the
Civil War to the civil rights era, a process he says is an inspiration
for struggling African nations. “You can begin to see America
as a nation that is evolving from serious internal contradictions.
That is a model all of us learn when we come to the States.”
Since February 2008 Tsunga has been director of the Africa program
for the International Commission of Jurists, an organization of
judges and lawyers committed to defending human rights. Working
out of the commission’s new South Africa office, Tsunga organizes
training programs in southern and eastern Africa for judges, lawyers,
and organizations to promote “good governance, human rights,
and the rule of law.”
His work has gained worldwide recognition. In 2006
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights presented
him with the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, and
in 2007 he accepted the Freedom Defender’s Award from Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice on behalf of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.
“Arnold has had a huge impact in raising the profile of Zimbabwean
issues in front of the international legal community,” says Laura Young,
a staff attorney at the Advocates for Human Rights, where Tsunga did a professional
affiliation while in Minnesota. “He is very well respected across the
African continent as an attorney and an advocacy figure.”
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