Police held liable for rights abuses

A Ugandan High Court judge has ruled that police and other security forces may not rely on ‘higher orders’ or claims that they were waiting for orders ‘from above’, to justify human rights violations. Judge Margaret Mutonyi ordered that significant damages had to be paid by way of compensation to a number of applicants after she found police reprehensible in their rights abuse, writes Carmel Rickard in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site. In one of the two applications that she dealt with together, a number of people were wrongly arrested for participating in a legal protest against the raising of the age limit for Uganda’s President. After their arrest they were held for longer than the law allows. In the other case, the wives of a man being investigated for murder were also arrested. Between them they had about a dozen children, some of them still breast-feeding, and under a year old. All of them were taken away by the police after the mothers were detained. The police put the women under severe stress by refusing to tell them what had happened to the children and even saying they had been given away and that they would never see them again. The court heard the children were also arrested and held for 51 days.

Uganda judgment

A Matter of Justice