Africa-Press – Eswatini. Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organization has released a report, highlighting the ongoing human rights violations in the Kingdom of eSwatini.
The report released on Thursday(30th October 2025), highlights among others, the lack of a political will to investigate the killing of innocent civilians during June 2021 political unrest.
Eswatini is an absolute Monarchy, political parties are banned from participating in elections while human rights defenders are arrested, tortured or even killed for demanding democracy.
“In June 2021, amid a drastic deterioration in the human rights situation and citizens’ growing anger at a lack of reforms, waves of pro-democracy protests rocked Eswatini, an absolute monarchy ruled by King Mswati III since 1986. What started as an expression of outrage against alleged police brutality and impunity in the death of 25-year-old University of Eswatini student, Thabani Nkomonye, transformed into wider youth-led calls for democratic reforms across the country. The protests were mostly peaceful, but they turned increasingly violent towards the end of June when the government took a hardline stance against the demonstrations”, reads the report in part.
The report further states that, when the protests erupted, eSwatini authorities responded by banning demonstrations and deploying security forces to disperse the protesters and closed schools for an extended period of time.
“They also prohibited people from in-person delivery of petitions to state authorities calling for democratic reforms. This report, based on 15 interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch in 2025, corroborates findings previously published by Human Rights Watch that the Royal Eswatini Police Service (REPS) and the Umbutfo Eswatini Defence Force (UEDF) not only improperly used teargas, and rubber bullets, and physically assaulted civilians during the June 2021 unrest, but also shot indiscriminately at protesters and passers-by with live ammunition, killing scores of protesters and injuring hundreds more, including children. Additionally, it shines the spotlight on the absence of accountability since then and the precarious and desperate situation of victims of security forces’ abuses in 2021, calling for urgent action to be taken to remedy this,” the report states
On another note, Human Rights Watch said on October 29, 2021, the Eswatini Commission on Human Rights and Public Administration released a preliminary report stating that forty-six(46) people were killed and two hundred and forty-five(245) suffered gunshot injuries, including twenty-two(22) who sustained multiple gunshot injuries.
“The Commission noted that its findings likely underestimated the number of victims and called on the government to conduct a comprehensive investigation. Victims told the Commission that members of the Eswatini armed forces and police shot them, but the Commission declined to identify the perpetrators in its preliminary report. As of this writing, the Commission had not released a final report,” reads the report in part.
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