AfriForum wins decade-long struggle to register with UN
4 October 2020
The civil rights organisation AfriForum has received confirmation that the organisation is now officially registered with the United Nations (UN) as nongovernmental organisation with special advisory status. This status offers AfriForum various opportunities and privileges to continue its work on a much larger scale in the UN’s conference rooms. The breakthrough was made despite the South African government working actively for many years to deprive AfriForum of these opportunities.
Ernst Roets, Head of Policy and Action at AfriForum, explains that the South African government’s representative at the UN’s offices in New York told him years ago that he had received instructions from Pretoria to prevent AfriForum from being registered with the UN’s division for nongovernmental organisations (a subdivision of ECOSOC). The representative went as far as to say that the government’s attempts in this regard were not personal, but politically driven.
“The representative explained to me in 2015 that the South African government opposed AfriForum’s registration because AfriForum was ‘talking too much’ and ‘was too arrogant’ to the government’s liking,” Roets says. “He then told me that he would be contacting South Africa’s alliance partners to ensure that AfriForum’s application was unsuccessful. He called these alliance partners by name: China, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Sudan.”
Roets asked the representative to explain why AfriForum was, according to government, too arrogant. The representative then referred to AfriForum’s campaign against farm murders, as well as the fact that AfriForum had objected to the invitation to the former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, to attend Jacob Zuma’s presidential inauguration.