Lecturers make bold stance over controversial law exam

Law teachers at Uganda’s Makerere University have taken a brave step – in the name of academic freedom, they have declared their unanimous support for colleagues who set a controversial constitutional law exam. The paper requires students to think critically about several current rule of law and judicial independence problems in Uganda. One parodies a real-life situation playing out in Parliament and another asks them to critique a factual ‘directive’ to the Chief Justice, issued by Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, in which the CJ is required to ‘review’ a judicial decision. Carmel Rickard, in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, notes that criticism of Museveni and other highly-placed officials is often punished in Uganda, so the exam questions shocked many and led to the university’s vice-chancellor ordering an ‘investigation’ into the paper.