More than a dozen organisations concerned with the rights of women and children in Uganda have expressed dissatisfaction and concern about the decision to pardon and release 13 convicted prisoners. Their concern was based on the fact that 11 of those released were serving sentences for defilement (child rape), and the organisations questioned the commitment of the authorities to protecting girls and women from rape and sexual assault. They have urged more transparency around such decisions in the future and want the current list of pardoned convicts to be reviewed. An announcement by the Uganda Prisons Service that 13 convicted…
Author: Carmel Rickard
Should Zambia’s president live in his own home? It’s a question that was raised in the constitutional court recently by Sean Tembo, head of a Zambian opposition party. The seven judges of that court had been asked by Tembo to find that the country’s president, Hakainde Hichilema, should have been living in state house instead of his own home. Tembo cited the cost and inconvenience to the public of the daily presidential cavalcade from his private home to his offices in state house, and asked the court to find that the expense was unjustified and unconstitutional. More than two years…
A desperate woman who says she was duped by a local Namibian traditional healer into selling him her house at a small fraction of its true value, has been helped by the supreme court to keep her case alive. Elizabeth Neis, a retired nurse, consulted the healer because she had landed in financial trouble. He agreed to help her, but told her that her house was inhabited by evil spirits who would cause the death of someone from her family if they stayed on in the house. He proposed that Neis should sell him her house and said he would…
Indications are growing of a worrying trend to weaken judicial independence in Uganda. This week, the Ugandan judiciary issued a statement entitled ‘Interference of court processes undermines judicial independence’ in which it expressed misgivings about a government district commissioner who had been ‘meddling in court matters’. But just last month, the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, ‘meddled’ even more dramatically, writing a letter to the chief justice, saying the CJ should investigate a controversial judicial decision authorising the auctioning of the national mosque, even implying the CJ should ensure the decision was overturned. The resident district commissioner of Ntungamo, western Uganda,…
It’s rare for any country’s apex court to reverse an earlier decision it had made and say it was wrongly decided. But Eswatini’s supreme court has recently done just that. In fact, it went even further, and declared that elements of two of its own decisions needed to be set aside as made in error. The key issue in the case was the status of marriages in Eswatini, made in terms of local customary law. Both the two earlier decisions had upheld the consequences of a 1902 colonial law, and concluded that such marriages were not ‘lawful’. The particular result…