The Ugandan government has failed to hold to account security officials, who have unlawfully detained and tortured hundreds of government critics, opposition supporters, peaceful protesters, and others, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday.
The 62-page report, “‘I Only Need Justice’: Unlawful Detention and Abuse in Unauthorized Places of Detention in Uganda,” documents enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detention, torture, and other ill-treatment by the police, army, military intelligence, and Uganda’s domestic intelligence body, the Internal Security Organisation (ISO), most in unlawful places of detention in 2018, 2019, and around the January 2021 general elections.
“The Ugandan government has condoned the brazen arbitrary arrests, illegal detention, and abuse of detainees by its officials,” said Oryem Nyeko, Uganda researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Urgent steps are needed to help victims, to hold abusive security agents to account, and to end this specter of impunity and injustice.”
Although the authorities have sometimes acknowledged these abuses, they have done little to end them or to provide justice to the victims and their families, the report says.
According to it, victims face persistent physical, mental, and economic problems during and after their detention, as well as obstacles to obtaining justice.
HRW says between April 2019 and November 2021 it interviewed 51 people, including 34 former detainees, witnesses of abductions and arrests, government officials, members of parliament, opposition party members, diplomats, human rights activists, and journalists in the capital, Kampala.
Former detainees described how security officials flouted criminal procedures during arrests and while holding the detainees in custody.
Security officers accosted victims at their workplaces, homes, or on the streets and forced them, sometimes at gunpoint, into unmarked vehicles, usually Toyota Hiace vans, locally known as “Drones.”
In some cases, detainees were taken to an island on Lake Victoria, or held in vehicles, an underground room in the parliament building, and military barracks, one testimony suggested.
A man who was detained by Internal Security in a safe house in Kyengera in 2019 is quoted saying “I saw three military tents and two State House pickups and three other vehicles, [full of] of victims just like me, but I didn’t know that when I was entering there. I thought it was someone’s home.”
On February 5, 2020, the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights released a report from investigations it had opened the previous year into allegations that ISO officials had abducted and illegally detained more than 400 people.
The report confirmed that government security agencies, were detaining and abusing people in “safehouses.”
The committee recommended that the relevant agencies investigate the allegations further but HRW says the government has taken no steps to carry out the recommendation or otherwise end the unlawful, abusive practices.
It says in the two months before the January 2021 general elections, and for several months afterward, incidents of abuse spiked.
“In Kampala, and its surrounding districts, the security forces arbitrarily arrested, and sometimes forcibly disappeared government critics, opposition leaders and supporters, and alleged protestors. While the authorities have released some detainees in the course of the past year, the whereabouts of many have not been revealed” the report says.
A woman who had been held by internal security in a safehouse said that an official raped her twice, and other officials also tortured her.
“I was tied up – they called it ‘Rambo’ – I was crucified. I was in pain. I stayed [in that position] for 12 hours. I was removed at 1 a.m. in the night. [My body] was swelling before I was taken inside” she is quoted in her testimony.
WN/as/APA