Zambia's passport cancellations of six critics spark human rights alarm

On Friday, Amnesty International issued a stark accusation: Zambian authorities had weaponized a routine administrative tool to punish political opponents. Six passports had been cancelled by Government Gazette Notice No. 1421 of 2026—documents belonging to former ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba, academic Sishuwa Sishuwa, former lawmakers Binwell Mpundu and Emmanuel Jay Banda, former presidential aide Kaizer Zulu, and blogger Lillian Mutambo. The cancellations were immediate and total. The documents were no longer valid for travel or identification. They had to be surrendered at once. And the government had offered no public explanation of what any of these six people had actually done.

The stated justification was national security. That phrase appeared in the official notice. It appeared in government statements. But it was never unpacked. No specific allegations were laid out. No evidence was presented. No details were given that would allow the affected individuals—or the public, or courts—to understand what threat these six people supposedly posed to the nation. This silence, Amnesty argued, was the point. The mechanism of state power was being used not to protect security but to silence dissent.

The timing mattered. Zambia had just held elections in 2026, and the months surrounding that vote had been marked by what Amnesty documented as a pattern of arrests and intimidation targeting opposition members, journalists, and activists. Opposition politician George Chisanga had been detained. In August, during a security operation, former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya had been shot and killed. The passport cancellations arrived in this context—not as an isolated administrative action but as part of a broader squeeze on political space.

Zambia's legal framework actually provided some guardrails. The Passports Act did permit cancellation, but only on specified grounds: circumstances that would justify refusing a passport in the first place, loss of citizenship, fraud, certain criminal conduct, or death. The law also required the Chief Passport Officer to notify affected persons of the reasons for cancellation within fourteen days. The Constitution, separately, protected freedom of movement under Article 22, including the right to leave and return to Zambia—though it allowed restrictions where reasonably justifiable in a democratic society for purposes like defence, public safety, and public order.

Zambian courts had already signaled skepticism toward executive overreach on this issue. In a 1991 Supreme Court decision, Nyirongo v Attorney-General, the bench had held that a citizen's constitutional right to travel included a right to a passport, subject only to lawful restrictions, and had ordered the return or replacement of a passport where the government failed to establish sufficient legal basis for withdrawal. More recently, the High Court had ruled in Andrew Kamanga v Attorney General that confiscating a passport and requiring official authorization to travel unlawfully restricted freedom of movement. These precedents suggested the courts might not simply defer to an invocation of national security.

Amnesty also grounded its challenge in international law. Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Zambia had ratified, protected the right to leave any country, subject only to limited lawful restrictions. The organization called on the government to reverse the cancellations, restore the passports, and provide remedies to those affected.

What happens next depends on whether the six individuals choose to fight. They have the right to challenge the cancellations in Zambian courts. If they do, the government will face a burden it has not yet met: demonstrating both a statutory basis for the action and whether any restrictions satisfy the constitutional requirements that govern national-security limitations. The law, in other words, has already spoken. Whether the courts will enforce it is another question.