From Moses Magadza in Johannesburg, South Africa

The Secretary General of the SADC Parliamentary Forum (SADC PF), Ms Boemo Sekgoma, has called on parliamentary researchers and legal drafters across Southern Africa to become vigilant guardians of existing human rights.

She warned that attempts to erode rights are often subtle, hidden in legislative loopholes, silence, ambiguity and seemingly innocuous provisions.

Ms Sekgoma made the call on Saturday at the end of a three-day Sweden-funded SADC PF capacity-building workshop for parliamentary researchers, legal drafters and human rights officers from the SADC region in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The workshop strengthened the capacity of parliamentary professionals to recognise emerging anti-rights narratives and legislative strategies and to subject Bills to rigorous human-rights scrutiny before they become law.

Closing the meeting, Ms Sekgoma said participants were leaving Johannesburg better equipped to recognise and respond to anti-rights strategies within legislative and policy processes.

“I think it is a shared feeling that participants are now better informed on anti-rights narratives and legislative strategies,” she said.

She contended that confronting anti-rights movements should not be misunderstood as an attempt to invent new categories of rights.

Rather, she said, the task is to protect, implement and defend rights that already exist and ensure that nobody is discriminated against or excluded from their enjoyment.

“Countering the anti-rights movement is not about the creation of new rights which do not exist on the statute book. The countering of anti-rights has everything to do with the full implementation of existing rights and the prevention of discrimination,” she stated.

She added: “It is about implementing universal human rights whilst leaving no-one behind.”

She urged parliamentary professionals to apply the proportionality test when considering restrictions on rights. She said human-rights discourse should enable rights rather than cancel them and, in doing so, allow democratic societies to function effectively.

Drawing on the historical struggle for women’s rights, she reminded participants that freedoms now widely taken for granted were once fiercely contested.

“Every time you see a woman driving a car, using a bank account alone, or even voting at the poll station, is a sight that attests to the consistent efforts made in countering anti-rights over decades of struggle,” she said.

There was once, she noted, a school of thought that sought to portray women as lesser human beings who were not entitled to enjoy the same rights as men.

Although women’s rights have grown stronger, Ms Sekgoma warned that similar forms of exclusion persist, increasingly directed at people who are regarded as different.

“Even today, while the rights of women have grown stronger, we see the same oppositions not necessarily against women, but against those who are different, including key populations, People Living with HIV, foreigners, vulnerable populations or marginalised communities,” she said.

She posed what she described as a fundamental question confronting democratic societies: “The key question remains to what extent, if at all, should a different human being be deprived of his or her rights.”

Ms Sekgoma said the deliberations in Johannesburg had reinforced the argument that philosophies which seek to deny people rights simply because they are different have no place in contemporary society.

Accordingly, she said, the pro-rights agenda should be understood as defending established legal boundaries against erosion.

“The pro-rights discourse is not promoting the establishment of new human rights, or new rights, but is simply defending the legal frontiers which already exist so that they are not invaded, or transgressed against the rule of law,” she said.

She warned that anti-rights provisions can hide in plain sight and said that attempts to roll back rights rarely announce themselves openly.

“Attempts to cancel rights are not obvious. They are mostly discrete, if not surreptitious,” she said.

She explained that rights can be weakened when legislation contains loopholes, ambiguous wording or silence on critical questions, leaving provisions open to interpretations that undermine legal certainty and protection.

“Countering anti-rights must involve being alert to this situation and thus leave no room for doubt in legislation,” she said.

That warning resonated strongly with the practical work undertaken during the Johannesburg workshop.

In one of the key sessions, participants were trained to analyse Bills through a human-rights lens and identify legislative “red flags.”

Facilitator Ms Mary Wambui Kimemia from Ipas Africa Alliance took participants through tests including legality, legitimate purpose, necessity and proportionality, equality and non-discrimination, participation and accountability, and whether proposed legislation advances rights or rolls back existing protections.

The training cautioned against mechanically labelling legislation anti-rights merely because it deals with sensitive subjects such as cybercrime, public order or regulation of non-governmental organisations.

“We can’t classify all cybercrime Acts as being anti-rights. We can’t classify all non-governmental organisations Acts as being anti-rights,” Ms Kimemia told participants.

Instead, researchers and legal experts were encouraged to establish the legitimate problem a Bill seeks to solve and then examine whether the proposed legislative response is precise, necessary, proportionate and non-discriminatory.

They were also exposed to legislative language that should trigger deeper scrutiny. References to concepts such as “morality,” “sovereignty,” “family values,” “parental rights” and the “promotion” of ideas or conduct were discussed as potential red flags depending on their context and effect.

“It just means we need to scrutinise it a bit more,” Ms Kimemia said.

The workshop also highlighted the importance of intervening early in the law-making process.

Country experiences from Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Zambia and Zimbabwe demonstrated that by the time problematic legislation reaches a final parliamentary vote, opportunities for meaningful technical intervention may already have narrowed considerably.

A Zambian participant explained that parliamentary actors had learnt the value of engaging government technocrats while legislation was still being developed rather than waiting for Bills to arrive in Parliament.

“There is actually opportunity to engage the process when it is in its raw form before it has even seen the light of day,” the participant said.

Participants explored how parliamentary researchers and legal drafters can work with ministries, Attorney-General’s offices, civil society organisations, scholars, traditional and religious leaders and other actors to strengthen rights-based legislation.

Ms Sekgoma said another major lesson was the need to look beyond the appearance or title of legislation and interrogate its actual consequences.

“It is necessary to look at the substance of rights rather than form,” she said.

Only by examining the substance and content of a right, she argued, can parliamentary professionals determine whether restrictions imposed upon it are reasonable within a democratic society founded on human freedoms.

 “Superficial reading and template drafting benefit the anti-rights discourse,” she warned.

That message echoed another intervention during the workshop by facilitator Ms Matilda Lasseko-Phooko of the Centre for Human Rights, who urged parliamentary professionals not to become distracted by labels when examining legislation.

“The naming shouldn’t distract us from the substance,” she said.

Ms Lasseko-Phooko also challenged researchers and legal advisers to recognise their own assumptions and consider whose voices may be absent when legislation is being developed.

“Be aware first of your own bias, accept that it’s your own bias, and then also be conscious of who is being left out of this conversation, who will be impacted by this,” she told participants.

Ms Sekgoma similarly called for the region to develop confidence in its own rights-based legislative processes rather than uncritically importing approaches from elsewhere.

“This is where there is a need to evolve and ensure that we own our domestic processes and the region does not suffer from outside contagion or suffer from imported philosophies about how to address the rights-based framework,” she said.

The Secretary General expressed confidence that strengthening the technical expertise of those who research, analyse and help draft legislation would provide an important layer of protection for human rights across SADC Member States.

“This is why those who are directly involved in the legal drafting process have been capacitated to ensure that domestic processes are sufficiently robust to address the anti-rights discourse,” she said.

The SADC PF convened the workshop with funding from Sweden.

• Moses Magadza is the Media and Communications Manager at the SADC Parliamentary Forum.