ARE AMERICAN REPORTS A RELIABLE SOURCE ON MOZAMBIQUE?

Monday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax” informs us, in a headline on its front page, that Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo Party “continues to stick its hands into an inefficient judicial system”.The paper’s source for this claim is the recently published human rights report for 2014 issued by the US State Department. The State Department has a legal obligation to issue human rights reports annually on all countries, with the significant exception of the United States itself.The paragraph that “Mediafax” seized on is the following: “Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, according to civil society groups the executive branch and the ruling Frelimo party heavily influenced an understaffed and inadequately trained judiciary”.Which civil society groups made this claim and when? The State Department does not tell us, but it is instructive to look back at the reports from previous years.Thus for 2013, the State Department report said “Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, according to civil society groups, the executive branch and the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) party heavily influenced an understaffed and inadequately trained judiciary particularly in the lower tiers.”.

And the report for 2012 said “Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, according to civil society groups, the executive branch and the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) party heavily influenced an understaffed and inadequately trained judiciary, particularly in the lower tiers”.And guess what – for 2011, the report said “Although the constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary, according to civil society groups, the executive branch and the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) party heavily influenced an understaffed and inadequately trained judiciary, particularly in the lower tiers”.Year after year, we see almost exactly the same formulation. This goes right back to 2009. But for 2008, the report was a bit different. Then it said “The constitution and law provide for an independent judiciary; however, the executive branch and the ruling FRELIMO party heavily influenced an understaffed and inadequately trained judiciary, particularly in the lower tiers”. Even the minimal source of unnamed “civil society groups” was not used then.Are we to suppose that the same anonymous civil society groups were contacted every year, from 2009 to the present, by the US embassy, and said exactly the same thing, word for word? A more parsimonious explanation would be that lazy diplomats at the embassy simply copied and pasted from the previous year’s report, working on the principle that “if we said it last year, it must be true”.In other words, nothing at all can be understood about the Mozambican judiciary from such a report. To learn whether or not Frelimo exercises undue influence on the courts, reporters would have to do their own homework, and interview their own sources, instead of giving credibility to a US report which just recycles itself, year after year.