On 11 October 2024, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) made a submission to the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in advance of its consideration of Lesotho’s human rights record during the 49th session of the UPR in April and May 2025.
The ICJ’s submission highlights three key human rights concerns in Lesotho:
- Access to inclusive education for children with disabilities;
- The revocation of practising certificates of legal practitioners working for non-governmental organizations (NGOs);
- The rights to equality and non-discrimination of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) persons.
Despite Lesotho’s acceptance of recommendations during its third UPR cycle in 2020 to ensure access to inclusive education, challenges remain in implementing the 2018 Lesotho Inclusive Education Policy (LIEP). Referencing the organization’s 2023 report on children with disabilities’ access to education in Lesotho, the ICJ’s submission highlights a number of concerns, including: inadequate financial resources; infrastructure problems; and inadequate training for teachers.
The ICJ’s submission also expresses concern over the Law Society of Lesotho’s decision in May 2024 to revoke the practising certificates of NGO-based legal practitioners, which will hinder the provision of legal aid services to marginalized groups and, in turn, exacerbate access to justice challenges in the country, where State-provided legal aid is already limited.
In addition, the ICJ submission outlines the organization’s concern about the fact that Lesotho’s legal framework fails to adequately protect LGBTIQ+ individuals from discrimination and violence, despite the introduction of new laws intended to address these pressing concerns following Lesotho’s 2020 UPR review.
In light of these concerns, the ICJ’s submission calls on the UN Human Rights Council and the UPR Working Group to make the following recommendations to the Lesotho authorities:
On the right to inclusive education:
- To invest in and carry out regular pre- and continuing in-service training for teachers on inclusive education.
- To accelerate the finalization of the LIEP’s implementation plan to ensure that the Ministry of Education and Training is comprehensively equipped to implement the Policy.
- To scale up the Special Education Unit’s capacity to monitor the quality of inclusive education through quarterly school visits.
- To desegregate the education system in Lesotho to ensure that children with disabilities can attend mainstream schools in the communities in which they live.
- To carry out full and meaningful consultations with civil society organizations (CSOs) and persons with disabilities, and fully operationalize the Persons with Disability Advisory Council, including by swiftly appointing a Director General.
On NGOs providing legal aid services:
- The Law Society should affirm and ensure the application of section 7(2)(c) of the Law Society Act and desist from applying any procedure or process that insists that lawyers attempting to provide pro-bono legal services be members of law chambers to be accredited as practising members of the Law Society.
- The Law Society should work closely with NGOs to jointly map out and resolve the challenges in the provision of State legal aid.
- The State, through the Legal Aid Office, should produce, publicize and implement a timebound plan to fully implement the Legal Aid Act and commit to allocating resources from the national budget to establish multiple legal aid offices across the country to ensure wider accessibility of such services, beyond urban centres.
- The State should explicitly include a provision in the proposed Lesotho Legal Practice Bill that recognizes and governs the involvement of NGOs in legal practice.
On the right to equality before the law of LGBTIQ+ persons:
- The authorities should explicitly include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics as prohibited grounds of discrimination under section 18 of the Constitution.
- The authorities should conduct a comprehensive review of all laws and policies in the country to ensure that they explicitly affirm and protect the human rights of LGBTIQ+ persons, including the right to equality before the law and equal protection of the law without discrimination. The legislature and relevant government departments should conduct this review in consultation with CSOs, lawyers, LGBTIQ+ persons and other relevant stakeholders.
On the decriminalization of consensual same-sex sexual conduct
- The authorities should amend section 37 of the Sexual Offences Act to expressly repeal the common law offence of sodomy.
- The authorities should repeal the provision in Schedule I, Part II of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, listing sodomy as an offence.
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[Submission] Read the full submission to the UPR Working Group here.