HRW says government violating rights of the opposition

The Uganda government has admitted that torture and other human rights abuses constitute a problem in the country’s security services, but said that such cases involve rogue individuals acting without state sanction. "These are cases of high-handedness by individuals which are being wrongly portrayed as if they were institutionalised," a National Resistance Movement (NRM) government spokesman, Ofwono Opondo, told IRIN on Tuesday in the context of a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report accusing government security forces of systematically violating the rights of political prisoners. The HRW report, issued on Saturday, said the government was using its security and "anti-terrorism" forces as a cloak for cracking down on and intimidating political opponents. "Uganda set up a shadow sector of security operations to contend with armed rebel groups and crime waves," the report quoted Jemera Rone, a Uganda researcher for the HRW, as saying. "But now the security system serves to punish and deter political opposition by detaining and torturing their supporters." Opondo, however, said HRW had "based its findings on a mixture of press cuttings and anecdotes from the alleged victims, but these allegations are tainted with political motivations". "They don’t research properly. If they could give specific people and names of places where they stayed, then check the prison registry to ensure what they are being told concurs with records, this would be better," he added. The HRW report coincides with accusations by opposition figures that the government is hiring thugs to disrupt meetings and forums. At the beginning of March, pro-NRM youths disrupted a meeting of the opposition Parliamentary Advocacy Forum, beating some MPs attending the meeting. The MPs claimed they had evidence that the youths had been paid by senior ministers to disrupt the meeting. Opondo said that in most cases, incidences of people arrested by the security forces in which torture was alleged, the suspects would be taken to court. "What would be the point of extracting confessions by torture when these confessions would not hold up in court?," he asked.