• World Report 2012: Uganda
    Jan 22, 2012
    During demonstrations in April, following February’s presidential elections, the unnecessary use of lethal force by Ugandan security forces resulted in the deaths of nine people. Opposition politicians and hundreds of supporters were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly and incitement to violence, and state agents beat and harassed journalists covering the unrest.
  • World Report 2011: Uganda
    Jan 24, 2011
    Freedoms of assembly and expression in Uganda have come under attack in 2010, the pressure intensifying in advance of presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for February 2011. Journalists critical of the government face intimidation and sometimes criminal charges from state agents and members of the ruling party. Security and quasi-military organizations continue to illegally detain and torture suspects, in some instances leading to death. Impunity for human rights abuses persists. For example, Uganda failed to carry out investigations or prosecutions for the deaths of at least 40 people killed, some by military police, in riots in September 2009.
  • Uganda
    Jan 20, 2010
    Impunity, corruption, and the erosion of independent institutions obstruct the protection of human rights in Uganda; government efforts in 2009 to tackle these shortcomings were weak. With parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for early 2011, the ruling party faced increased criticism from the opposition for failing to deliver electoral law reform or address the perceived partiality of the Electoral Commission, voter disenfranchisement, and incumbents' use of state resources during campaigning.
  • Uganda
    Jan 14, 2009
    In 2008 the government of President Yoweri Museveni and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) concluded peace talks to end the long-running war in northern Uganda, but LRA leader Joseph Kony did not sign the final peace accord.
  • Uganda
    Jan 30, 2006
    Uganda failed to make progress on human rights and its international reputation suffered in 2005. The conflict in northern Uganda claimed victims daily and more than 1.5 million people continued to languish in displaced persons camps, vulnerable to abuses by the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and an undisciplined government army, the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF). The Ugandan government arrested on treason and rape charges the front-running challenger to twenty-year incumbent President Yoweri Museveni, only three weeks after he returned from exile. Dr. Kizza Besigye, the candidate for the opposition Forum for Democratic Change, was charged with twenty-two others; when fourteen of those were granted bail, government Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force agents in black suits entered the court building and prevented all present from leaving. The chief justice denounced the “rape” of the courthouse. Other political opponents and journalists were threatened and put in jail for criticizing the government, and some, accused of rebel collaboration or treason, were tortured in illegal detention centers.
  • Uganda
    Jan 30, 2005
    The war in northern Uganda, which started when President Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement/Army took power eighteen years ago in 1986, continued in 2004. Violence and related human rights abuses abated somewhat by mid-year yet predictions of an imminent military solution to the conflict proved unfounded. The war pits the northern Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) against the government's Ugandan Peoples' Defence Forces (UPDF) and the people of the three northern districts where the Acholi live – and the war has expanded to parts of eastern Uganda in 2003-04. In February, the LRA committed the worst massacre of the entire conflict in an eastern district by attacking Barlonyo internally displaced person’s camp, defended only by a small local defence unit, and killing more than 330 people. The LRA continues in its practice of abducting children, who remain the main victims of this war. President Museveni did, however, take an unprecedented step in referring the case of Uganda’s LRA to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in December 2003. The ICC agreed to undertake an investigation but peace activists in Uganda remain wary that Museveni will manipulate this international institution to punish his foes, and thereby diminish chances for a negotiated settlement, while avoiding investigation of the Ugandan army’s abuses. Ugandan security agencies have proliferated and are implicated in torture and illegal detention of suspected rebels and their sympathizers. The Ugandan government continued to support armed groups in the conflict in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), despite officially withdrawing from eastern DRC in accordance with the Luanda accords signed in September 2002.