4.2.8 Zimbabwe During the year under review, the chapter focused its attention on creating awareness of recent media laws among CSOs, selected publics and Members of Parliament. CSOs such as Crisis in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe are conducting advocacy work around AIPPA and POSA. There is still however little initiatives from other CSOs. The major part of the work under this programme was advocacy around POSA. Although it has been difficult to measure the level of awareness created by the campaign, MISAZimbabwe received a considerable number of phone calls and e-mail messages of people seeking more information and further clarification on POSA. However, a lot of work still needs to be done. At the moment, it remains difficult in the current political environment replete with violence and intolerance to take campaign activities to periurban and rural areas. This is because many of these areas have been declared “no go areas” to anyone perceived to be opposed to the government. Therefore, campaigns such as the one on POSA and AIPPA can only target citizens in urban areas. 4.3 Media law reform campaign The main activities under the campaign have been the fight to repeal the two repressive pieces of legislation in Zimbabwe. The Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) have been used consistently to arrest and detain journalists and other members of the public. AIPPA successfully led to the closure of newspapers and other media in the country. Zimbabweans protest the application of the Public Order and Security Act The other activity has been the continuation of the campaign to reform legislation through legislative and parliamentary bodies which began in 2002 and led to the holding of regional workshop in October 2002 that brought 72 parliamentarians and other stakeholders together in Lusaka, Zambia. This campaign was coupled with the carrying out of an audit of all repressive media laws in Lesotho and Swaziland which has been used as an advocacy tool with parliamentarians. A booklet on the audit on Swaziland was produced. Subsequent to these research activities, a major undertaking to compile all previous audit of media laws that restrict MISA Annual Report (April 2003 – March 2004) 24