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Legal services essential during Covid-19 lockdown
All interventions to fight the spread of Covid-19 must have a legal framework to support them before they can have a basis.
The World Health Organisation, which declared coronavirus a global health pandemic, owes mandate to a legal instrument; United Nations Declaration passed in 1945.
Even the social measures established to prevent the spread of Covid-19 such as social distancing, regular washing and sanitising of hands find their legal force in laws such as the Public Health (Control of Covid-19) Regulations 2020 which are made under the Public Health Act 1935.
Without this law, the police and other security organs would have no basis to enforce any measure or guidelines about Covid-19.
So, if the law is fundamental to the fight against Covid-19 and indeed the law is fundamental to the organisation of everything else in the society, why is it that legal services do not enjoy the same designation as other essential services during the Covid-19 lockdown?
Isn’t it odd that we should designate security services such as the army, police, prisons and private security firms which are all involved in enforcement of the law and yet we only allocate 30 lawyers to provide legal services practitioners?
If these legal services are not essential, why does the police arrest violators of the lockdown and then wait on magistrates to open some of the closed courts only to remand the accused without an option of applying for bail, ironically because of the Covid-19?
I see that the law enforcement at this time without the availability of essential legal services to the public, will promote a lot of illegal detentions and create more legal disputes than it was set to resolve.
My suggestion, therefore, is that all lawyers should be designated as essential services during the Covid-19 lockdown. We can follow the example of South Africa where services related to the essential functions of the Courts, Judicial Officers, Sheriffs and Legal Practitioners required for these cases are now categorized as essential services under their Disaster Management Act 2002.
Next door in Kenya, legal practitioners have been dropped off the list of the curfew order and are now listed as an essential service under the Public Order Act. Thanks to the proactiveness and industry of the Kenya Law Society which petitioned the Constitutional Court for this relief. But in Uganda, our Law Society cannot even cause the courts to open and at least hear one petition regarding the lockdown.
Whereas the Uganda Law Society is still in the game, its relevance has been reduced to murmurs from the spectators’ stands.
In designating legal services as an essential service during the Covid-19 lockdown, priority should be given to all urgent cases which affect the overall public health, well-being and safety of the citizens, irrespective of whether the cases are directly related to Covid-19 or not.
There are many people and businesses out there who/which are threatened with irreparable damage to their very survival but cannot access legal services for urgent redress because of the lockdown. What is the point of people surviving Covid-19 only to die from other preventable causes?
In conclusion, I wish to state that it may be profane and inaccurate to declare one service more essential than the other during this Covid-19 lockdown.
Muwema is a managing partner at
Muwema & Co Advocates.
