The chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health, Ruth Labode, said they are lobbying President Emerson Mnangagwa through the Speaker of the National Assembly seeking amnesty for people imprisoned for wilful transmission of HIV.
This comes after the Parliament of Zimbabwe recently repealed section 79 of the Criminal Law Code, which criminalized wilful HIV transmission.
According to National Aids Council (NAC), Zimbabwe currently has the highest rate of HIV criminalisation prosecutions in Sub-Saharan Africa and the sixth highest in the world.
As of April 2021, Zimbabwe had 18 individuals who have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for wilful transmission of HIV.
Speaking during a NAC workshop for editors and station managers in Mazowe, Labode said:
I made a request in Parliament on a privilege point, I asked the President officially through the Speaker [of the National Assembly] to say can the President now use his amnesty powers to make sure that everybody that was imprisoned because of this law be granted amnesty and released.
So that’s where we are and that’s what we are lobbying for in line with the recent repealing of section 79 of the Criminal Law Code.
Commenting on the recent decriminalisation of wilful transmission of HIV move, Health and Policy Consortium of Zimbabwe Projects Coordinator, Dorcas Chitiyo said:
What do we mean by decriminalizing wilful transmission of HIV? It means that the law is no longer applicable here in Zimbabwe. That law has been nullified.
In this case, the potential miscarriages of justice in terms of proof and causality, in terms of the negative public health impact of criminalization have been attacked head-on through the decriminalization of wilful transmission.
The decriminalization happened by repealing Section 79 of our current criminal code.
Decriminalization is different from legalization. These are two related yet distinct aspects.
When we say we decriminalized, it does not mean we legalized wilful transmission.
This means that the criminal penalties that were attributed to the act, are no longer in effect.
In this respect, what we are terming wilful transmission is no longer attaining a criminal penalty.
[However]… if a person is convicted of a sexual offence and it is realized after that conviction that this person was aware and proceeded to commit the sexual violence act, and they were HIV positive, it is taken as an aggravating factor and you will still be held accountable.