Is the Public Order Bill a ploy to numb the citizenry?

SOURCE: THE DAILY MONITOR, 3 DECEMBER 2011

A military police officer lashes suspected protesters in Kampala during the walk-to-work protests in April. The proposed law will give the security agents the mandate to use excessive force to quell protests.  

In Summary

Rights vs Creed? Faced with mass protests led by the opposition in April over high commodity prices, government found itself grappling with how to contain further protests. It came up with the Public Order Management Bill that, if passed into law, will mandate the police to regulate public gatherings and violently quell protests. Saturday Monitor analyses the Bill.

When on April 11 opposition pressure group, Activists for Change called on the masses to abandon their cars and walk to work in protest of increasing commodity prices catapulted by soaring inflation, government found itself in a cagey situation.
The protests that came to be known as Walk-to-Work were on the heel of the Arab Spring that has seen hitherto deeply entrenched governments in North Africa crumble. The government found it logical to curb any form of protests but since the right to demonstration is enshrined in the Constitution, it became a stumbling block to government scheme, or so it appears.

First was attempts to scrap the constitutional right to bail to deter potential protesters from rising against government by ensuring that riot suspects are kept on remand for up to eight months instead of the constitutional 48-hours-maximum. With stiff opposition to the scheme, government decided to and push through Parliament a new law to regulate public gatherings called the Public Order Management Bill 2011.

The Bill, now before Parliament’s Legal Committee, states as its intention, “to provide for the regulation of public meetings; to provide for the duties and responsibilities of police, organisers and participants in relation to public meetings; to prescribe measures for safeguarding public order; and for related matters.”

While this might appear noble, the detail of the proposed law reveals a hyena in sheepskin. This is a law that seeks to turn inside-out the norm in the realm of free expression and assembly in a democratic dispensation.

Already, it has come under attack from the Uganda Law Society, the Uganda Human Rights Commission and several civil society organisations individually or through a coalition set up to primarily focus a campaign against the Bill being passed in its current form.

According to the explanatory memorandum for the Bill, it among others “seeks to manage public order” and to “specify the procedure to be followed when organising an assembly, a procession or demonstration as well as the penalties and sanctions to be imposed upon those found to breach the proposed law.”

Mr Solomon Webaalearaali, a human rights lawyer with Street Law Uganda, says that alone means that government is seeking to take away what ideally is the essence of demonstration as a means of expressing dissatisfaction in a democratic society.

“Public demonstration has an element of spontaneity, but this law will seek to establish procedures like applying for permission to demonstrate and if you are denied by the police then you go through an appeal process and then a court process; that takes away the purpose of demonstration, imagine people wanted to demonstrate because they took a mother to deliver in Mubende and she was not attended to and she died, do they have to wait and go through all those processes?”

‘Control system’
Mr Ladislus Rwakafuzi shares the sentiment, arguing that rather than seek to regulate public gatherings, the law in its current form is only seeking to make illegal what should otherwise be naturally a legal right of assembly and expression. He says the law seeks to establish a “control” system.

“What this law is doing is to try take away what is a fundamental right by attempting to define what is a legal assembly and what is illegal which should not be the case,” he argues.

Maj. Okwir Rwaboni, a former Youth MP turned activist with the Center for Constitutional Governance, says the definition of “public meeting” under Section 6 of the proposed law is a transplant from an obnoxious colonial law against the people of Karamoja, which gave powers to police to disperse or arrest a meeting of any three Karimojong men.

The section defines a public meeting as “a gathering, assembly, concourse, procession or demonstration of three or more persons in or on any public road as defined in the traffic and Road Safety Act or any other public place or premises wholly or partly open to the air.”

“This law is not only draconian and obnoxious but rather violated the principles of humanity itself,” Maj. Rabwoni says, referring to Act 17 of 1956 apartheid South Africa, adding that the 1978 Riotous Assemblies Act in South Africa is greatly echoed in the Bill government wants Parliament to pass.

In defining public places where an assembly can be dispersed and the individuals arrested if they have not sought clearance for the assembly in Section 6(a) and (b), the law defines public places as those areas; “at which the principles, policy actions or failure of any government, political party or political organisation …are discussed,” in (b) the purpose of the discussion is defined as “to form pressure groups to submit petitions or to mobilise or demonstrate support for or opposition to the views, principles, policy, actions or omissions of any person or body of persons or institution including any government administration or government institution.”

Critics of the Bill say these provisions effectively take away any automatic right for people to assemble and questions government actions or inactions. Those jittery about the Bill in its current form say they are concerned that government is increasingly resorting to rule by law rather than rule of law. They argue that the spirit of the new law is a panicky reaction to increasing public pressure on government expressed through demonstrations especially over the last six years.