Incest cases stall passport issuance

In another incident, he noted, a bio- logical father sired children with his daughter.

"Such cases are coming up and complicating passport work. So, sometimes the public...bash(es) the Passport Con- troll Office for delaying passport work, but these are some of the complications we get at the passport office," Mr Mundeyi said.

He added: "Even if a child was fathered by your relative, that child is still a Ugandan and deserves a passport. So, we shall proceed to give a passport be- cause we know these things happen in [our society

Information about applicants begotten through incestuous relationship, he said, should be shared "with us in camera (and we shall see how to help other than leaving those spaces in the passport application form on parents' particulars blank"

Incest under Uganda's laws refers to sexual intercourse involving parents and their children or grandchildren or between nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, step sisters and brother, step parents, mothers and fathers-in-law and sons and daughters-in-law Section 149 of the Penal Code Act pro- vides that a person convicted of incest is "liable to imprisonment for seven years or, if that other person is under the age of eighteen years of age, to imprisonment for life".

Police registered 52 cases of incest in 2022, higher than the 33 that the law enforcement agency recorded the year before, according to details contained in the 2022 Annual Crime and Road Safety Report.

There, however, were no convictions secured and only nine of last year's cases against seven men and two women progressed to court.

A highly-placed source said investigators ran into headwinds because some of the suspects were children of, or themselves, powerful people in government, security and private sector and whose cultures permit romantic relations among relatives.

Under the law, however, incest cases are prosecutable irrespective of whether the sexual intercourse between parties was consensual and the law empowers courts to divest a convict of all responsibility or guardianship over a victim who is under 21 years.

In his revelations made at the weekly police briefing, which he expounded on during a follow up interview with this publication, Internal Affairs ministry's Mundeyi said a mother made the first revelation on incestuous relation- ship to them after processing of their son's passport stalled, risking his scholarship in Canada.

The spokesman said the woman, whose particulars he withheld for legal and data protection reasons, broke down and sobbed uncontrollably when asked about the details of her child's father and spoke out only after prolonged counselling.

"The father of her son," he said, quoting the lady, was "unfortunately her brother."

Mr Mundeyi said this disclosure prompted them to examine afresh passport forms where applicants skipped parts relating information on biological parents, and without providing substitute details of guardians

Their inquiries, he noted, found that nearly 80 of such applicants in recent months were children begotten by close biological relatives

The Internal Affairs ministry is responsible, among others, for issuance of passports and other travel documents to Ugandan citizens through the Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control.

Officials said they now double-check information that passport applicants submit against particulars in the da- ta bank of the National Identification Registration Authority (NIRA), the issuer of national Identity Cards, the requisite document for processing pass- ports.

"We have a number of passports [on which decisions] have been deferred. You come, you apply for a passport, but because of insufficient information that you have availed, we cannot process that information. So, we keep it in abeyance or pending. The [missing] information is mainly to do with parents," Mr Mundeyi said.