This aspect of the day’s identity passed over and garnered little reflection or comment. 

Perhaps it’s understandable? For the media images of joy and human excellence are a convenient antidote, albeit temporary, to the rights-less, dangerous and despairing situation that millions of people face in their daily lives. 

But the truth is that in these times, human rights and human rights activists need more time and more recognition – not less. Even during a World Cup. Instead the opposite has happened. After a promising start, human rights issues surrounding the World Cup have been systematically filtered out of the picture.

Who cares about women, queers and migrants when there’s a game on?  

It is a further sign of the new times that unlike 30 years ago, when in South Africa and across the world, a tornado of revolutions seeking human rights helped to empty many prisons, the exact reverse is now happening. In many countries the jails are filling up again, and there is very little concerted effort and condemnation to stop it. 

This is in part linked to the rapid erosion of another supposed-to-be universal human right: the right to peaceful protest. More and more people are ending up in prisons just because they are trying to protest against the conditions in which they live. 

This truth was documented in an important Global Assessment on Protest Rights released by Civicus last week. It shows that of the 131 countries where protests were recorded in the past year, protestors were detained in at least 92.

Source: the Civicus Monitor, an online research platform that tracks fundamental freedoms in 197 countries and territories.

In view of this, although they can’t hear us from their dungeons, Maverick Citizen thinks it’s important to name some of the people and groups of people who no longer have the “privilege” of gathering with friends and family for a global celebration such as the World Cup.

We think of media owner and activist Jimmy Lai, imprisoned again last week, and the hundreds of other pro-democracy defenders in Hong Kong and across mainland China. 

We think of veteran Zimbabwean activist and MP Job Zikhala at Chikurubi prison in Harare (read his son’s letter here); as well as the two MPs, Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube, and other political prisoners still languishing in King Mswati’s jails in Eswatini. 

We join the calls for global solidarity with the 18 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters arrested two years ago in India and framed under the country’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and still sitting in prison. 

Read in Daily Maverick: “India’s government unleashing controversial Unlawful Activities Prevention Act as means of silencing civil rights activists”

We send a salute to Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin and Putin’s uncounted political prisoners, locked away in so-called penal colonies closely reminiscent of Stalin’s gulags. 

We see the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt’s jails, including Alaa Abd El-Fattah, where not even the attention of the world’s media on his detention during COP27 was enough to budge the Egyptian government to release him.   

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We recognise Julian Assange in a British jail and support the call made by editors and publishers from around the world for the US to end his prosecution for publishing secrets. We see also the growing number of climate crisis protesters spending months in prison “on remand” after the passing of a draconian new law by the UK parliament effectively prohibiting certain rights to protest and freedom of expression. 

We see the thousands of protesters in Iran in the jails of the theocracy for rising up for women’s rights, some at risk of execution like Mohsen Shekari; we see the political prisoners of the Junta in Myamar; we see an estimated 4,450 Palestinian political prisoners in Israel. 

This list is tiring to write, incomplete and sadly growing by the day. Ignore it at your peril.

Human rights versus sovereign wrongs

The “right” to imprison their political opponents is a right that governments of all stripes are arrogating for themselves, part of what they consider their sovereign nation status. That prisons can fill up again and on such a scale and with near impunity, is a sign of the weakening of multilateralism and the very notion of human rights as an organising principle of governance and international law. 

We should not allow this to happen in South Africa.  

This is not somebody else’s business. It’s important to see that there is a causal connection between human rights activists who put their lives on the line and the democracies we celebrate. Without the release of political prisoner 46664 in 1990 there would have been no South African Constitution signed on International Human Rights Day 1996. Without the Constitution we would not have been able to resist State Capture. 

We owe it to the political prisoners of the world to see them and speak up for them. We should not be silent. If nothing else, support Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign and write a letter today. DM/MC