Can we please free the jails?
What you need to know:
- It will take more than presidential mercy to solve this problem.
The afternoon of October 22 came with news of President Museveni granting pardon to 130 convicted “minor offenders”, on public health and humanitarian grounds.T
heir crimes ranged from something as petty as possession of opium to robbery, manslaughter etc.
The President pardoned them in the exercise of his powers as enshrined in Article 121 of the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda.
To these prisoners’ families, friends and loved ones, this is welcome, impactful news but in the grand scheme of things, this is just a tiny dent in a prison system filled to the brim with prisoners who have no business being there in the first place.
It will take more than just a wave of a presidential wand of mercy to solve this problem.
According to the Uganda Prisons Service statistics from September 2023, remanded prisoners made up 48 percent of the total prison population, convicts made up 51.4 percent and debtors rounded it out with 0.6 percent. The prison occupancy rate was north of 360.8 percent. Tinned sardines have more room.
The treatment that prisoners are facing in our system can be argued to be a crime. It’s an affront to human rights. It is also a demonstrable failure of government policy and the perpetrators are continuing to send piles and piles of Ugandans into an already clogged prison system without consequences. It needn’t be this way.
Let me explain. Article 23 of the Constitution guarantees protection of personal liberties. It also provides in various sections, including section 6 a), b) and c), conditions for mandatory release on bail should an arrested person stay in jail beyond a certain period before trial. This period ranges between 60 to 180 days depending on the crime committed.
By some estimates, merely implementing these constitutionally specified bail guidelines would reduce our prison population by more than 25 percent.
But why don’t we do that, you may ask? The answer: politics and blatant disregard for the Constitution.
The President, we might recall, publicly complained about the courts granting bail to what he considered hardened criminals and terrorists.
The Judiciary, through Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo, issued Legal Notice No. 8 of 2022; “Bail Guidelines for Courts of Judicature (practice) directions, 2022”.
These guidelines said, among other things, that “in the case of a person who has been on remand for 180 days in accordance with Article 23(6)(c) of the Constitution, the Magistrate’s Court shall immediately refer the file to the High Court.”
They continued: “For the avoidance of doubt, mandatory release on bail for offences triable by the High Court under Article 23(6)(c) of the Constitution shall be granted only by the High Court.”
These guidelines obviously usurp constitutional protections and fly counter to Section 76 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act.
Mere practice guidelines were never envisioned to do that but in a country where authority stems from individuals rather than the written laws of the land, these guidelines have been religiously followed in various courtrooms strewn across the country, with devastating effects on civil liberties. The clogged jails are a testament to this.
We need a rethink of the remand and bail policy. Empty the jails!
Mr Natif is a team head, Public Square
@TonyNatif
