By Halima Athumani
KAMPALA
Amnesty International has urged the Ugandan government to revise three pieces of legislation enacted within the last 18 months, saying the new laws have led to increased state repression.
"Repression in Uganda is increasingly state-sanctioned through the use of blatantly discriminatory legislation that erodes rights guaranteed by the constitution," Sarah Jackson, Amnesty's deputy regional director for East Africa, told Anadolu Agency on Thursday.
"The government must act now to revise these toxic laws, which threaten the core of human rights in Uganda," she said.
A new Amnesty report released Thursday in Uganda asserts that three recent pieces of legislation – the Public Order Management Act, the nullified Anti-Homosexuality Act and the Anti-Pornography Act – have served to violate fundamental human rights in the East African country.
"We find instances of individuals being arbitrarily arrested, ill-treated in detention and political rallies being broken up," Jackson told AA.
All three laws were passed by parliament and signed into law by the president between August 2013 and February 2014.
Jackson said the Public Order Management Act "essentially reverses the basic premise on which the right to freedom of assembly is based."
She lamented that, instead of facilitating peaceful demonstrations, the law "imposes wide restrictions on them."
Steven Odong of Human Rights Network Uganda, a local NGO, agreed.
"The challenge with this law is that we have seen selective application, such as suppression of opposition political party rallies and civil society groups such as the Black Monday," he told AA.
The Black Monday movement was started by local activists to protest the theft of public money. Several of the group's activities have been stopped by police and many of its members detained under the Public Order Management Act.
"As we go into 2016 [general elections], we shall increasingly see this law being applied," said Odong.
"We have challenged this legislation, but the problem also is that our justice system is very slow," he added.
Jackson, the Amnesty official, noted that, following approval of the Anti-Pornography Act, "women were harassed by police and one lawyer in court was threatened by a female police officer with arrest because of her clothing."
She also criticized the country's Anti-Homosexuality Act – passed into law earlier this year before being nullified in August – which saw people identified as homosexuals being evicted from their homes and losing their jobs.
"Many have taken the law into their own hands through mob justice and abuses against women and homosexual people," Jackson told AA.
Government spokesman Ofwono Opondo, for his part, asserted that Uganda did not fashion its laws to please the international community.
"This report is misplaced, misguided and unfounded," he told AA. "We have an elected parliament mandated to make laws that govern this country."
"If they have any objections, there are mechanisms through which they can complain, such as going to the courts," he added.
Opondo challenged the human rights watchdog to produce "police and medical records" proving that homosexuals had been harassed in Uganda.
Pepe Onziema, program manager at Sexual Minorities Uganda, a local NGO, cited 162 cases of violations and abuse of homosexuals, including house evictions, mob attacks, detentions, blackmail and extortion, and abuse.
"Most arrests usually end up being cases of blackmail and extortion, which we have managed to report to police. But of course they've not been followed up on," he told AA.
"Most cases we followed up on were dropped because there were no proper legal charges the police could press," Onziema explained.
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