NSHR

Dear Media Practitioners, Interested Parties, Academics and Researchers as well as Civil Society Actors of Repute:

Attached hereto in PDF Format is the Extended Version of NSHR’s submission or Stakeholder Report 2010 under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedure of the 47-Member UN Human Rights Council (HRC), formerly known as the UN Commission on Human Rights.

This Report has been submitted to the HRC in terms of paragraph 3(m) of HRC Resolution 5/1 of June 18 2007, as well as under Section B of the General Guidelines for the Preparation of Information under the UPR. It focuses on Namibia’s human rights shortcomings and the Government of Namibia (GoN)’s non-compliance with the letter and or spirit of, among other things, (1) the UN Charter, (2) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR); (3) the extra-conventional human rights mechanisms; and (4) the conventional human rights mechanisms to which Namibia is party, as well as on the recommendations for the appropriate solutions to the shortcomings identified herein.

Before it was submitted to the HRC, this Report was circulated to as many stakeholders as possible, including to GoN (i.e. to the Office of the Prime Minister) to elicit comments thereon. Hence, we highly value the few critical, if any, comments (and also the praising ones) which we have received from stakeholders in response to our invitation to do so before this Report was sent off to the HRC in Geneva.

NSHR deeply regrets that GoN has failed in its obligation to similarly circulate its own Report to stakeholders in the country before being submitted to the HRC. Hence, media practitioners and or any other interested parties are hereby encouraged to establish from the Office of the Right Honorable Prime Minister Nahas Angula as to why the GoN report was not circulated for comments by stakeholders before being sent off to Geneva.

The general thrust of the NSHR Report is that, while Namibia has ratified most of the key international human rights treaties, GoN largely pays lip service to the practical implementation of such treaties at the domestic level. Our Abridged Version has already sent and received by the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and will form an integral part of the review of GoN’s human rights record.

Phil ya Nangoloh
Executive Director