Uganda: UN Outlaws Safe Houses, Uganda Praises Move
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The Monitor (Kampala)
July 4, 2006
Posted to the web July 5, 2006
Posted to the web July 5, 2006
Grace Matsiko
Kampala
Kampala
THE United Nations has endorsed a convention outlawing secret detention facilities, referred
to as "safe houses" in Uganda.
The International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance was approved on June 29 by the recently established UN Human Rights Council, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Deputy head of mission in Uganda, Mr Beat A. Mosimann, has said.
Mosimann said the convention requires the States to hold detainees in officially recognised places of detention, maintain up-to-date registers and detailed records of all detainees, authorise them to communicate with their families and legal counsel, obligations that are all critical to preventing enforced disappearances.
"The ICRC always insists on the importance of these rules when it visits people held in connection with armed conflicts and other situations of violence. It therefore welcomes their inclusion in the new treaty," Mosimann said in a press release.
Third Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for information and National Guidance, Mr Kirunda Kivejinja, welcomed the UN move yesterday but said government had not received the copy of the convention.
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"Anything that goes to strengthen human rights, will not find Uganda wanting" the Kivejinja said.
Illegal detention centres popularly came to be called safe houses where suspects are tortured to extract confessions by State agents gained notoriety in Uganda up to 1995 until Parliament abolished them. They, however, resurfaced in 2001 but the government has consistently denied they exist.
The government said the few gazetted houses that existed especially in Kampala were security houses meant to accommodate foreign dignitaries and were
not to be torture chambers.
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