SW Radio Africa news - The Independent Voice of Zimbabwe
The co-founder and leader of the pressure group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), Jenni Williams, has won another international honour in recognition of her work.
Williams on Wednesday received the James Lawson Award for her success in ‘civil resistance’, along with three other activists. The ceremony in Boston, Massachusetts saw the awards namesake, James Lawson, personally hand over the prizes. He was the prime strategist behind the US civil rights movement.
The WOZA leader has faced more than 50 arrests during the group’s many peaceful protests in Zimbabwe over the years. The group of mainly women has received worldwide recognition for their demonstrations, which are almost always broken up by violent police reaction.
It is as a result of this systematic and targeted abuse of the WOZA group that has seen an official communication being filed at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. The communication, filed in April by WOZA’s lawyers, seeks to have the Zimbabwean authorities indicted against targeting the group with arrests, harassment, intimidation, and physical assaults.
In the communication WOZA challenged the pattern of impunity they have faced in Zimbabwe, where a Supreme Court order guaranteeing their right to peaceful protests has been ignored. That order was passed down in 2010, but the group is still the target of arrests and assaults almost every time they gather for meetings or peaceful demonstrations.
Williams was honoured Wednesday along with Russian environmental activist Evgenia Chirikova, South African consumer boycott leader Mkhuseli Jack and Bolivian civil rights leader Oscar Olivera.
“Today the map of nonviolent resistance is truly global, and Evgenia, Khusta, Oscar and Jenni represent the diversity of struggles, the refusal to quit, and the personal courage of nonviolent organizers and activists all over the world,” said Hardy Merriman, the vice president of the Center that hosted Wednesday’s awards.
To contact this reporter email [email protected] or follow on Twitter