AfricaPress-Tanzania: TANZANIA has successfully implemented a number of recommendations of the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in areas like the fight against corruption and children’s rights but stumbled in democracy and related aspects of human rights observance.
For the past four years, the government has been working on 133 recommendations contained in Tanzania’s second UPR issued by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2016 at the UN offices in Geneva.
The report on implementation of the recommendations was compiled by civil society organizations, which unveiled the report in a press briefing in Dar es Salaam yesterday. It shows that the government implemented recommendations on the fight against graft and the protection of children with albinism by 100 per cent.
This was seven percent of 133 recommendations agreed by the government since 2016 to improve human rights and stem habitual violations, the presentation noted.
However, recommendations that dwelt on the completion of the constitutional review process, review of the death penalty and the international convention against torture and forced disappearance, amounting to four per cent of the UN recommendations were not implemented at all, the brief affirmed.
Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) Executive Director Ana Henga said that the government implemented successfully 89 per cent of recommendations on women’s rights, children as well as economic and community rights.
“This indeed shows that the government has taken significant measures to implement the recommendations as per the United Nations Human Rights Council,” she said, highlighting that the report was drawn up by LHCR in collaboration with the Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRDC) and Save the Children, a global NGO.
The report writing process dates from 2016 after the UPR congress was held in Geneva, so local CSOs established an action plan to make follow up on recommendations to which the government had committed itself, the director noted.
The Tanzania Human Rights Defenders Coalition (THRDC) coordinator, Onesmo Olengurumwa, said the report had been submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on March 25. About 200 representatives from the CSOs met in Morogoro to set strategies of collecting information on the government’s performance, he elaborated
The meeting was also attended by an official of the Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance (CHRGG) and the Ministry of Constitutional and Legal Affairs, he said, expressing gratitude to Unio and Zanzibar government institutions for cooperation in this exercise.
UPR involves a review of human rights records of UN member states so as to improve the human rights situation in those countries and addressing human rights violations wherever they occur, he added.
