N AT I O N A L I N Q U I R Y R E P O R T ZIMBABWE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION For Human Dignity 3.2.12 Centralisation of Services Critical in Facilitating Registration Challenges of accessing services which are critical in facilitating issuing of national documents such as provision of birth confirmation records at health facilities were noted. Where medical facilities were far, it became difficult to access the birth confirmation record which is a legal prerequisite for registration of births. In “I had fingerprints uplifted on 5th April 2019. I was told instances where a person did not have a birth to follow up after one month which I did and was told confirmation record or needed replacement of they were not yet out and was asked to come back birth certificate, exorbitant transport costs to after another month. I followed up and was again told travel to medical institutions prevent many they were not yet out. I never went back”. 41-yearpeople from registering births due to lack of birth old male witness from Bulawayo Metropolitan confirmation records. Province. It was further established by evidence that clearance of fingerprints75 is only carried out by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Zimbabwe Police Service (ZRP), also based in Harare. This centralization means that all the DRG offices at the different levels send fingerprints to Harare for clearance thus lengthening the processing time. The process and red tape involved in transmitting the fingerprints to Harare is cumbersome. The process is initiated in the DRG sub-offices, which forwards them to the district offices. These offices in turn hand over to the provincial offices, which finally deliver to the Harare national DRGs office. The national office in turn dispatches the fingerprints to the CID Headquarters for verification and clearance. The reverse process retraces the same steps until the fingerprints reach the sub-offices. These delays were further exacerbated by shortages of vehicles at the DRG sub-offices and district offices. Witnesses also testified that by the time they get feedback on their finger print verification process, they would be deemed to have expired and the process has to be repeated. In some cases, the process takes as long as six months or more. This has caused a lot of frustration with people giving up on the process of acquiring identity documents. Representatives from the DRGs office attributed the delays in fingerprint “We send fingerprints to the National Bureau for clearance. verification and clearance to the CID. Our fingerprints do delay a lot, sometimes it takes up to Contrary to this assertion, the ZRP in about 6 months. The department is not responsible for the clearance but the CID who are in charge of the National their submission indicated that the Bureau. They say they do not have the manpower to do process of verifying fingerprints takes a clearance, which is why it takes long”. The Provincial maximum of seven days and the Registrar for Bulawayo Metropolitan Province. National Fingerprint Bureau highlighted that they had no backlog76. There is therefore, need for the ZRP and the DRG to strengthen their collaboration in order to address this major barrier to access to documentation. 3.2.13 Mobile Registration Challenges The DRG’s office conducts mobile registration programmes as a strategy to mitigate the impact of centralisation of its offices. However, it was noted that they are usually conducted in a sporadic manner and time allocated is not sufficient as they only spend three days at a particular place. The mobile registration programme is usually conducted prior to elections to enable more people to register to vote and as such only happens at intervals of five years. For instance, only two mobile registration sessions were held in Mashonaland Central in the last ten (10) years. The other reason is lack of resources77. It was further established that the mobile registration programme offered limited services in relation to overall mandate of the DRG. It only offers services such as processing of manual birth certificates, death certificates and national identity cards. People with complicated documentation challenges were still referred to the district and provincial offices and got to be confronted with a myriad of challenges already alluded to above. This was done for applicants for IDs above 21 years to verify whether they had obtained an ID before. The National Fingerprint Bureau stated that 38, 417 requests were received from the DRG from January 2019 to December 2019 and these were all cleared within seven working days of receipt as required by their SOPs. 77 Mashonaland West Provincial Registrar. 75 76 25 25