INTERPOL, Oman, Zimbabwe Police Dismantle Human Trafficking Ring That Forced Victim To Swa

[Sanjna Jain is an International Law and Human Rights Fellow at the International Commission of Jurists in their Africa Regional Program] After months of deliberation, on 7 July 2026 Zimbabwe’s President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has signed into law a constitutional amendment that will that will keep him in office until 2030, delaying the originally scheduled 2028 presidential election. The constitutional amendment fundamentally reshapes Zimbabwe’s electoral system and the rules governing presidential tenure and will therefore have lasting effect well beyond President Mnangagwa. The amendment replaces the direct election of the President by universal suffrage with election by a joint sitting of Parliament and also extends presidential terms from five to seven years. In 2013, Zimbabwe adopted a constitution that introduced important democratic safeguards in response to the country’s decades-long history of authoritarian rule. However, continued governance concerns in the years that followed raise questions about the effectiveness of those protections in practice. The new amendment has attracted constitutional challenges from registered voters, war veterans and political actors on the ground that it permits the incumbent President to benefit from changes to the rules governing his own tenure, raising broader questions about constitutional amendments and political incumbency. Zimbabwe is not an isolated case. Across Africa, constitutional amendment procedures have increasingly been used to revisit the rules governing presidential tenure through the extension of terms and the removal of term limits, enabling incumbents to remain in office beyond originally contemplated limits. While the amendment process is an essential feature of constitutional democracy, it also creates a structural tension: those empowered to alter constitutional rules may simultaneously benefit from doing so. In the context of presidential tenure, this raises a question extending beyond legality: whether constitutional change may legitimately be used to reshape the conditions of incumbency in ways that entrench existing power. Zimbabwe’s Amendment Beyond presidential tenure and election, Zimbabwe’s constitutional amendment introduces broader institutional changes affecting electoral governance. The amendment increases the number of senators the President may appoint and reconfigures several constitutional commissions and electoral institutions. Although these changes may appear technical, they have broader constitutional implications because they affect the distribution of political authority and the independence of institutions responsible for administering elections and safeguarding constitutional compliance. The reforms also raise broader concerns about executive accountability. While supporters argue that extending presidential terms remains constitutional because the two-term limit is retained, critics contend that the amendment allows the incumbent President to benefit from changes to the rules governing his own tenure. More fundamentally, the replacement of direct presidential election by universal suffrage with election by a joint sitting of Parliament marks a fundamental shift in the constitutional logic of executive legitimacy, moving from a model grounded in direct popular mandate to one mediated through parliamentary selection. The Challenge Before the Constitutional Court The proposed amendment was first challenged before the Constitutional Court while it remained under consideration in June 2026. A central basis of the challenge was that, if the amendment was enacted in its original formulation, it would infringe political rights protected under section 67(1)(a) of the Constitution, which guarantee citizens the right to participate in free, fair and periodic elections. The challengers of the amendment also argued that, by altering the framework for electoral competition and restructuring the timing and form of presidential elections, the amendments woul