Amnesty warns of escalating rights crackdown in Zambia ahead of Thursday's elections
Amnesty International's 18-page briefing warns that stalled reforms and interlocking legislation in Zambia have reversed human rights gains heading into the country's 13 August 2026 elections.
Three days before Zambians go to the polls, Amnesty International released an 18-page briefing titled Authoritarian Practices Eating Away at Human Rights in Zambia on 10 August 2026, documenting an intensified crackdown on freedoms of assembly, association, expression and media in the run-up to the country’s 13 August 2026 general elections. The briefing warns that stalled reforms have left Zambia’s human rights in Zambia trajectory heading backwards, and catalogues the specific legal tools being deployed: a proposed NGO Bill that would give the government “excessive powers over registration, regulation, suspension and dissolution of CSOs,” a colonial-era Public Order Act still on the books, a May 2026 Public Gatherings Bill that President Hakainde Hichilema declined to assent to, and the 2025 Cyber Security and Cyber Crimes Acts.
Independent reporting from Zambia Monitor, based on interviews conducted in May 2026 with 14 human rights defenders, seven journalists, four student leaders and two opposition politicians, corroborates Amnesty’s findings and adds texture to them. The cancellation of RightsCon in May 2026, according to that reporting, was a concrete signal of how far civic space has already shrunk. The outlet’s timestamp (“4 days ago” relative to 10 August) implies the briefing was first circulated to journalists around 6 August, three days before the official Amnesty press release, a discrepancy worth flagging because it suggests the document had been working its way through embargoed coverage before Amnesty’s own publication date.
The Maravi Post’s coverage fills in the legislative context, noting that Parliament passed 77 Bills just before dissolving in May 2026 with insufficient public input, and documenting specific incidents of press harassment: the April 2026 attack on journalist Alfonso Kasongo, the August 2024 sedition arrest of Thomas Allan Zgambo, and a 2024 incident in which opposition figure Sean Tembo was chased inside Kawambwa Police Station. Each of those is a name, a date, and a verifiable incident, and together they show what “shrinking civic space” looks like when it lands on specific people rather than remaining an abstract trend.
The legislative picture is what makes the briefing’s warning land. Four pieces of legislation — the NGO Bill, the Public Order Act, the Public Gatherings Bill, and the Cyber Security/Cyber Crimes Acts — are not independent of each other; they are interlocking tools. Even if Hichilema’s refusal to sign the Public Gatherings Bill blocks one avenue for restricting demonstrations, the colonial-era Public Order Act is still available, the Cyber Crimes Acts criminalise the speech that would otherwise organise those demonstrations, and the NGO Bill would let the government deregister the civil society organisations that would defend them. Amnesty’s framing of “stalled reforms” is doing real work in the briefing: it implies the trajectory was once reversible, and that the moment for reversing it is closing.
What is unusual about this intervention is its timing. Amnesty typically publishes country briefings in response to discrete events, after-the-fact, and the three days before an election is precisely when a rights organisation would want its findings in front of voters, journalists, and international observers rather than filed away for the next quarterly cycle. The briefing is structured as a warning to whoever wins on Thursday: the legal architecture for a much narrower civic space is already in place, and a new government will inherit it on day one.