Jestina Mukoko

Jestina Mukoko is a Zimbabwean human rights activist. She is the director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project ( ZPP).

Life

The trained journalist and former news anchor of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation works for the Zimbabwe Peace Project, an organization founded in 2000 with the financial support of the Dutch and the Canadian government, whose reports on the situation in the country of African and Western embassies in Harare for confidential evaluation be used in the diplomatic correspondence. Mukoko collected evidence against the regime of President Robert Mugabe and built a network of human rights activists.

Mukoko was abducted on 3 December 2008 by about 15 armed men from her home in Norton. Opposition assume that the ruling party is behind the kidnapping. According to her 15 - year-old son, the gunmen have spent as a police officer. In the days after the kidnapping Mukoko activists Zacharia Nkomo, Brodrick Takawira, Pascal Gonzo and Gandhi Mudzwinga were kidnapped.

Mukoko and some other colleagues have to answer since the beginning of January 2009, a court in Harare because of conspiracy to revolt. They should have planned the overthrow of President Robert Mugabe, among others, and has already begun preparations, including the recruitment of persons and their military training in Botswana taken. Currently it is in the high-security prison Chikurubi.

After several courts had ordered their release already in the context of court proceedings against Mukoko the end of 2008, without the police nachkam these demands, the human rights activist was released from prison on March 5, 2009. While in custody, she was repeatedly subjected to torture, the medical care has been repeatedly banned by authorities.

On 10 December 2009, the International Day of Human Rights, the Human Rights Award of the City of Weimar to Jestina Mukoko and Sonja Biserko was awarded from Serbia. As part of the initiative " parliamentarians protect parliamentarians " of the German Parliament sought the deputies Marina Schuster to Mukoko.