HRW asks Uganda to close detention sites used for torture

Human Rights Watch called on the Ugandan government to close illegal detention centres used by the security services to suppress the opposition, in a report released Tuesday warning of the use of these sites for torture.

“Human Rights Watch calls on the Ugandan government to immediately close so-called safe houses and other illegal detention centers,” the human rights agency claimed.

The oenegé also called for the immediate release of persons detained at those sites.

The report is based on interviews with 51 people, including 34 former detainees and kidnapping witnesses who described the abuses suffered at the hands of police and security officers, between April 2019 and November 2021.

The repression intensified in the two months leading up to and after the 2021 elections in Uganda, when critics of the government, opposition politicians and protesters were illegally arrested and disappeared.

In many cases, the whereabouts of the detainees were unknown - according to HRW - a year after the elections, in which President Yoweri Musveni, who has ruled Uganda with an iron fist since 1986, was re-elected.

The victims consulted told HRW that they were crowded into vehicles known as “drones”, used in kidnappings of Ugandan government opponents, before being transferred to secret detention sites supervised by the Internal Security Organization (ISO), the local intelligence apparatus.

In these places, the victims were allegedly brutally tortured, as cases of captors tore off their nails, burned their bodies with irons or sexually abused them.

In some cases, the victims were handcuffed, chained and suspended from the ceiling for dozens of hours at a time, a technique called “Rambo”.

Others reported having been injected with unknown substances, receiving electric shocks, and some said they saw detainees with bricks hanging from their testicles.

Cases of abuse were documented in the report of a parliamentary committee in February 2020, which reported torture carried out in police and ISO detention centers, and called for further investigation.

But such investigations were not carried out, according to HRW.

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