The Foundation for Human Rights Initiative on Wednesday told the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee that is debating the Public Order Management Bill 2011, that Police should not be given too much power to control public assemblies because they would potentially abuse it.
Appearing before the committee chaired by Steven Baka Mugabi, the MP for Bukooli North, the Executive Director of the Foundation, Livingstone Ssewanyana said that open use of firearms by police, restricting assemblies of three persons and beyond, criminalizing any mistake during a demonstration and demanding that those organizing demonstrations apply seven to 14 days before to police, were not regulations but restrictions against civil liberties.
Ssewanyana said the possibility of criminal sanctions against organizers of assemblies should be removed from the proposed law. The proposal says that if an organizer does not comply with the notification requirement demanded of him or her, they will be held criminally liable.
Ssewanyana said that a number of restrictions put on organizers of public assemblies go beyond the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.
Ssewanyana said the Inspector General of Police, Maj. Gen. Kale Kayihura’s suggestion that international laws were being domesticated was misleading Ugandans on matters of international law. He said that domestication can only apply to laws that have been ratified by the government here and not all UN laws.
Ssewanyana opposed the proposal to allow a police officer use of firearms on demonstrators calling it excessive powers which the police could abuse. He said that in International law the intentional use of lethal force is only considered necessary and proportionate when it is used for the protection of life.
He said that instead police should be empowered to offer protection and facilitate peaceful assemblies rather than prohibiting and restricting them.
