How oppressive laws limit Civic space in Tanzania.
Oppressive laws limit the civic space in many ways but most notably by limiting the people's freedom of information and communication, freedom to assembly and expression. For the past seven years, many organizations and individuals have suffered this fate. Draconian legislations such as cybercrime law which criminalizes free speech, the statistics law which undermines research and publication of data, media laws orienting press freedom to unwarranted censorship, NGO self-regulatory law which gives absolute discretion and privilege to the registrar to deregister/ban works of CSOs contrary to the previous practice where most of these were companies limited by guarantee which would operate without arbitrary ban, controversial presidential directive to ban all political gatherings, The Basic Rights and Duties Enforcement act, subsequent threats of arrest, detention and facing of trumped-up non bailable criminal charges.
Therefore Reach Out Tanzania saw the need to bring the CSOs, like-minded organizations, and other stakeholders on board to address these challenges and provide the way forward. We did this through workshops, social media campaigns and publications. The workshop received good facilitation from the experienced lawyer Mr Jebra Kambole who in recent years became a volunteer counsel to many people and institutions suffering the fate of those repressive laws.
A renowned Human Rights Activist and Litigant Advocate Jebra Kambole facilitated the discussion at a workshop which gathered civic space stakeholders to discuss how repressive laws are limiting the civic space in Tanzania.
From the workshops, recommendations were developed as a way forward and means to improve the Civic space in Tanzania. Reach Out Tanzania published these recommendations from a legal perspective and tabled them to the speaker of the national assembly’s desk for further consideration in the future amendment and repeal.