Analysis by the Institute for Justice and Accountability in Uganda. Updated 8 August 2026.
By, Ronald Muhinda, Director of Communications and Publications at the Institute for Justice and Accountability in Uganda (iJA).
In short
The case. Dr Kizza Besigye, 70, a physician and four-time presidential candidate, and his aide Hajj Obeid Lutale are on trial for treason, a capital charge. It began with their abduction from Nairobi in November 2024 and their rendition to Uganda outside any legal process.
A military court first tried them though they are civilians. Uganda’s Supreme Court held such trials unconstitutional. The state recharged them in the civilian courts and passed a new law to reverse the judgment. Twenty months on, no trial had reached its evidence.
The trial opened before Justice Emmanuel Baguma without the defendants’ chosen counsel, their lead counsel, Senior Counsel Erias Lukwago, being imprisoned for serving court papers in the case. A prosecution witness testified with no defence lawyer present. Dr Besigye collapsed in the dock, handcuffed. Soldiers denied his physician access. He was driven to a military barracks, then to Mulago intensive care.
iJA has filed for Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale before the UN Human Rights Committee with an urgent request for interim measures, and has placed four cases before the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.
The full analysis follows.
At seventy, Kizza Besigye should not be in prison for challenging a president who has held power for forty years. For forty-five years he has been a presence in Uganda’s political life, drawing national respect for his judgment, admiration from supporters for his courage, and crowds to his rallies for his energy and charisma. Many Ugandans who have met him describe a generous, compassionate, and disarming man.
It is the last twenty-five years, spent openly challenging President Yoweri Museveni, that will likely define his legacy.
For the first fifteen years of his rule, Museveni fought armed remnants of the leaders he had deposed. Then Kizza Besigye, once his National Political Commissar, broke from within the ruling movement and challenged him directly, provoking the most violent state response against a political figure that Uganda had seen in peacetime.
By his own account, Besigye has lost count of how many times he has been charged. He has been prosecuted dozens of times. Not once has he been required to stand trial to its conclusion.
Over twenty-six years, Besigye, once Museveni’s ally and personal physician during the bush war that brought him to power, has faced a catalogue of charges: treason, terrorism, rape, illegal possession of firearms, incitement to violence, murder, and disobedience of lawful orders. He has appeared in court more times than either man can easily recall.
Political alliances turning into rivalries is unremarkable. What Besigye and Museveni produced is one of the most intense political confrontations on the African continent, born of diverging ideology and broken trust. Besigye has long argued that the commitments of the National Resistance Army were betrayed once the bush war was won. He built a direct political challenge to Museveni around dismantling the ruling party’s hold on government, ending what he calls a dynastic project, forcing concessions on political reform, and returning power to the people.
The price of that challenge has been consistent: in Uganda, to challenge Museveni is to be criminalised.
Abduction in Nairobi: A Covert Operation
A routine trip to Nairobi ended in Besigye’s abduction. Together with his longtime comrade Obeid Lutale, he was seized by Ugandan military officers from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence and the Special Forces Command, working with elements of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service under Director-General Noordin Haji. Both men were forcibly and extraterritorially rendered to Kampala under cover of darkness.
Besigye had travelled to Nairobi to attend the launch of Martha Karua’s memoir, Against the Tide: My Journey on a Less Trodden Path. He arrived a day before the event and was abducted the same day. His absence from the launch on 17 November 2024 was the first sign that something had gone wrong. By the time he was confirmed missing, he and Lutale had already crossed the Kenya-Uganda border in secret.
Martha Karua would later become Besigye’s lead defence counsel. As a former Kenyan Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs and a Senior Counsel, she carried a measure of protection that shielded her from the kind of retaliation Ugandan security services might otherwise have attempted against a lawyer associating with Besigye.
The extraterritorial seizure of a person without due process is unlawful under international law. The lengths to which Ugandan state agents went to capture Besigye and Lutale at Riverside Apartments in Nairobi constituted criminal conduct without legal authority. The cooperation between Kampala and Nairobi to abduct and render the two men points to clear violations of international human rights law and to unlawful custody once they reached Uganda.
The operation violated Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 6 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Article 9 of the ICCPR provides that everyone has the right to liberty and security of person, and that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention except on grounds and in accordance with procedures established by law. Article 6 of the African Charter states the same guarantee in similar terms.
International law exists in part to bind states. But it is domestic law, drawing its force from legislatures, statutes, judgments, and functioning courts, that carries the power of enforcement. This is why Chapter Four of Uganda’s Constitution, which protects fundamental rights and the right to a fair hearing, matters so much to what followed.
Charges Before the General Court Martial
After four days of detention at Makindye military barracks, Besigye and Lutale were arraigned before the General Court Martial, a court without jurisdiction over civilians, presided over by officers without legal training.
The charges read out were illegal possession of firearms, illegal ammunition, and treachery for allegedly plotting to overthrow Museveni’s government. The prosecution alleged that the two pistols and eight rounds of ammunition found at Riverside Apartments, items ordinarily restricted to the armed forces, placed the accused in violation of Section 4(1) and (2) of the Firearms Act, which prohibits the purchase, acquisition, or possession of firearms and ammunition without a certificate.
Besigye and Lutale, both civilians, stood before uniformed officers who answered to the Commander-in-Chief, prosecuted for offences arising from an unlawful seizure on foreign soil and an incommunicado rendition. The General Court Martial functioned as a judicial institution in form, but its composition and operation followed the military chain of command throughout.
The Chairman of the Court Martial, Brigadier Robert Mugabe Freeman, and the Judge Advocate, Brigadier Richard Tukacungurwa, pushed aggressively for a speedy trial, prompting concern among defence lawyers that reliance on anonymous evidence would produce a swift conviction. The court’s jurisdiction, the competence of its officers, and their impartiality were all challenged. Defence counsel observed in the court’s conduct the same rigid deference to hierarchy that characterises how senior military officers address subordinates.
Besigye and Lutale refused to enter a plea. Instead, they petitioned the Constitutional Court and the East African Court of Justice, challenging their abduction from Kenya and the legality of trying civilians before a military tribunal, a question the Constitutional Court had already resolved in their favour in an earlier case.
Without notice, the Court Martial amended the charge sheet in January 2025 to add a serving UPDF officer, Captain Denis Oola, who had been held in military detention at Makindye for nearly two years. Captain Oola was, by his own evident reaction in the dock, meeting Besigye for the first time in his life.
When asked to plead, Besigye challenged the Chairman directly. “Take plea on what?” he asked, declining to recognise the court’s authority. The Chairman entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.
Besigye’s defence team, Martha Karua, Erias Lukwago, Ernest Kalibbala, and Frederick Mpanga, argued at length that the court lacked jurisdiction to try civilians and sought referral of several constitutional questions to the Constitutional Court: whether the accused enjoyed the right to a fair hearing under Article 28, whether the Court Martial was independent and impartial, how Sections 127 and 128 of the UPDF Act should be interpreted, and whether the court had jurisdiction over firearms offences at all.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Colonel Raphael Mugisha, resisted referral, arguing that the Constitutional Court had already settled most of these questions in the Kabaziguruka case (Constitutional Petition No. 45 of 2016), which held the trial of civilians in military courts unconstitutional, but that the Supreme Court had stayed that ruling pending appeal, leaving civilians triable in military courts in the meantime. Brigadier Freeman agreed and denied the referral.
Freeman was then serving his third term as Chairman, appointed under Sections 197, 198, and 202 of the UPDF Act, which vests appointment power in the army’s High Command. The other panel members were Colonel Sam Ntugura, Major Catherine Angella Laker, Major Sunday Cyprian Magezi, Captain Sayuni Christine, Captain Nicole Lucy Eturo, Warrant Officer Mark Boris Oyar, and Warrant Officer Asiimwe Bob.
For two and a half months, Besigye, Lutale, and later Oola appeared before the Court Martial. Then the Supreme Court of Uganda issued a landmark ruling ending the trial of civilians in military courts altogether.
The majority held that courts martial lacked independence and fairness when subjecting civilians to military law, that their members owed loyalty to the High Command that appointed them, and struck out Sections 119 and 179 of the UPDF Act, the very provisions under which Besigye and Lutale had been charged. Those sections had provided for civilian offences to be tried under military jurisdiction. The Court ordered all pending civilian cases in the military system transferred to the civilian courts, ending a practice the government had long used to suppress political opponents.
The ruling was unexpected. Human rights organisations and the public welcomed it. The executive and the military leadership were stunned. President Museveni was furious, publicly denouncing the decision as wrong and declaring that Uganda is “not governed by judges,” whom he accused of being “foreign oriented.” His anger reflected the extent to which he had personally championed the use of military courts against political opponents.
Rather than implement the ruling, the government began drafting the UPDF Amendment Act 2025, intended to restore the trial of civilians in military courts under so-called “exceptional circumstances.” Section 117 of the new bill defined those circumstances broadly: anyone found, without authority, possessing or wearing a Defence Forces uniform, or unlawfully possessing arms, ammunition, or equipment ordinarily restricted to the armed forces, would once again be subject to military law.
Parliament passed the amendment on 20 May 2025, nearly four months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, and before a single case had actually been transferred to the civilian courts, reversing the constitutional gains the judiciary had delivered.
While government and military officials argued over the new law, hundreds of civilians charged before the Court Martial remained on remand across the country, their cases caught in administrative limbo. Besigye and Lutale remained at Luzira Upper Prison. As their remand warrants expired without renewal, a legal and political standoff began to take shape.
Defence counsel, led by Karua and Lukwago, campaigned for the unconditional release of Besigye, Lutale, and all civilians remanded by the now-defunct Court Martial, calling their continued detention illegal and extrajudicial. The Uganda Law Society joined the call. The government remained unmoved. The Directorate of Public Prosecutions claimed it lacked the case files needed to transfer the prisoners, leaving them in legal limbo.
In February 2025, frustrated by the lack of progress, Besigye began a hunger strike to protest his continued detention without a valid remand warrant. Images of his deteriorating health drew domestic and international attention. Under pressure, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions formally charged Besigye, Lutale, and Oola with treason at the Nakawa Chief Magistrate’s Court on 21 February 2025. Treason carries a possible death sentence in Uganda. Besigye, visibly weakened by a week without food, was wheeled into court to face the charge.
Nakawa Court: Procedure as a facade
The Nakawa Chief Magistrate’s Court has no jurisdiction to conduct full trials for capital offences such as treason. Pre-trial proceedings nonetheless revealed the substance of the state’s case: that Besigye and his co-accused had held meetings in Athens, Geneva, and Nairobi to solicit financial, military, and logistical support to remove Museveni from power.
Ugandan law entitles a person who has spent more than 180 days on remand without committal to the High Court to mandatory bail. Article 23(6)(c) of the Constitution and Rule 10(1) of the 2022 bail guidelines are explicit on this point. Defence counsel argued that Besigye and Lutale had by then spent 196 days on remand, counting from their initial committal at the Court Martial on 20 November.
Chief Magistrate Christine Nantege declined to rule on whether the 180-day threshold had been met, instead directing the defence to raise the matter before the High Court, which she said held exclusive authority to determine the legality of continued detention on remand. Senior State Prosecutor Richard Birivumbuka opposed the application, arguing it was improper to count remand time accrued under charges the Directorate of Public Prosecutions had not itself brought, an argument the defence rejected outright.
Nantege’s ruling came a month after High Court Justice Rosette Kania Comfort had separately denied the men bail, despite acknowledging that they had satisfied every formal bail condition, citing only a vague concern about possible interference with the investigation. It was the second time Besigye and Lutale had been denied freedom on grounds with no clear basis in statute.
The state then hastily prepared committal documents, presenting them to Nantege the following day, 29 May 2025. Chief State Attorney Birivumbuka told the court that investigations were complete, outlining the state’s claims about meetings in Nairobi, Athens, and Geneva aimed at securing funds and weapons to depose the government.
The defence resisted committal, seeking time to challenge Nantege’s bail ruling in the High Court. Nantege proceeded regardless. Besigye’s lawyers walked out in protest, a position Besigye endorsed, telling the court he had instructed them to petition a higher court. Nantege committed all three men to the High
The High Court: A Familiar Pattern
The case was assigned to Justice Emmanuel Baguma, then Deputy Head of the Civil Division. Although the file had initially gone to the International Crimes Division, a body with established procedures for serious crimes including witness protection, Baguma transferred it to the ordinary Criminal Division and assigned it to himself.
Aware of this irregular transfer, and concerned about political influence, the defence sought Baguma’s recusal. Besigye filed for mandatory bail on the grounds that he had now been on remand for more than 180 days. In August 2025, nine months into his detention, Baguma ruled that he could not determine whether that threshold had been met, and ordered the prosecution to proceed with disclosure instead.
The ruling provoked public outrage. Convinced that Baguma was influenced by figures within the ruling party, Besigye filed a formal application for recusal, citing bias and incompetence. Baguma dismissed it, stating he found no grounds for recusal, and criticised the accused for seeking his removal simply because his rulings had gone against them. Besigye’s objection was not to losing rulings. It was to the judge making them.
Undeterred, the defence petitioned the Judicial Service Commission over Baguma’s conduct. Baguma maintained that a complaint to the Commission could not disqualify him from the case. The defence then sought his permission to refer the question of his impartiality to the Constitutional Court, permission he refused. A second bail application followed, and was again denied. Rather than release the men after a year on remand, Baguma ordered that they take plea and proceed to trial, ruling that bail could only be reconsidered afterward.
When the indictment proved defective, unsigned by the court registrar and never properly served, Baguma ordered the defects corrected and the men returned to court the next day. Besigye, Lutale, and Oola again declined to plead, citing continuing inconsistencies between the indictment, which named three defendants, and the case summary, which referenced four. Baguma entered a not-guilty plea regardless, formally commencing the trial.
Across seven months before Baguma, from committal to plea, nearly every application the defence filed was dismissed, while the prosecution’s requests were granted. The pattern reflects what Article 28 of the Constitution is meant to prevent: courts that are neither independent nor impartial.
The Witness Protection Application
With bail foreclosed and recusal denied, the prosecution moved to begin trial in earnest, but first sought an order to conceal the identities of six witnesses under the label of witness protection.
The defence challenged the application by summoning the Chief State Attorney, Joseph Kyomuhendo, for cross-examination on the affidavit he had filed in support. Kyomuhendo argued that the court alone could determine the appropriate protective mechanism, since “we don’t have measures” in place. Defence counsel, led by Frederick Mpanga, cited Article 44(c) of the Constitution, which makes the right to a fair hearing non-derogable. Kyomuhendo argued, without legal basis, that the right could be displaced for witness protection purposes, pointing to procedures used in the International Crimes Division, a division operating under different rules from the one hearing this case.
Pressed on whether his own department had a formal witness protection policy, Kyomuhendo cited guidelines issued more than a decade earlier by then-Director of Public Prosecutions, now Supreme Court Justice Mike Chibita. When the defence had those guidelines read into the record, they stated plainly that “there is no legislation to provide for protection of witnesses in Uganda.” Kyomuhendo’s sworn testimony had been false.
Cornered, Kyomuhendo shifted ground, invoking Constitutional Petition No. 6 of 2007, Soon Yeon Kong Kim and Anor v. Attorney General, in which the Supreme Court held that pre-trial disclosure in criminal cases is mandatory, subject to protection of state secrets and informants. The defence countered, and Kyomuhendo conceded, that it was Besigye, Lutale, and Oola on trial, not the state, meaning the constitutional right to disclosure protected the accused, not the prosecution’s witnesses.
Facing a collapsing legal position, the prosecution withdrew the witness protection application, citing a desire to avoid delaying the main trial and to pursue “suitable, practical and appropriate alternative safety measures.” That the state had spent over a month allowing cross-examination on an application it ultimately abandoned suggests the proceedings have served purposes other than the expeditious trial the prosecution claims to want.
Justice Baguma then ordered full disclosure within twenty-four hours and set preliminary hearings for three days later. On the appointed date, the prosecution formally served disclosure materials and, for the first time, disclosed the identities of five of the six witnesses previously concealed as A through F.
Three are tied to the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, now renamed Defence Intelligence and Security: former chiefs Major General James Birungi (currently imprisoned) and Major General Abel Kandiho (under United States sanctions), alongside the current chief, Major General Richard Otto. A fourth witness, Andrew Wilson Orlando, describes himself as an American business consultant and former British military officer now engaged in private security work, though he is also known internationally as an arms dealer, a profile he shares with a since-convicted associate, David Greenhalgh, recently convicted in the United Kingdom of arms trafficking, and once listed himself as a state witness in this case. A fifth witness, Barasa Moses, is a businessman with interests in tea, coffee, and tourism. The sixth, reportedly a Kurdish national connected to a state-owned company, appears to have withdrawn after failing to secure protective measures, or possibly disappeared from the case altogether.
Preliminary Hearings as a charade
Uganda’s High Court Case Management Rules of 2021 govern preliminary hearings, intended to promote fair and expeditious trial once a plea has been entered. In this case, Justice Baguma dispensed with the underlying purpose of those safeguards, ordering trial to proceed before the accused had any meaningful opportunity to review the evidence against them.
After the prosecution disclosed 860 pages of documents and more than ten hours of audio and video recordings, Baguma gave the defence seven days to prepare. He proceeded immediately to administer the assessors’ oath under Section 67 of the Trial on Indictments Act, bypassing any meaningful effort to narrow the issues in dispute.
Article 28(3)(c) of the Constitution guarantees an accused person adequate time and facilities to prepare a defence. Despite Besigye’s request for thirty days, Baguma allowed seven. He also declined to address defence complaints that Luzira Prison authorities were denying electronic devices needed to review the audio and video evidence, and were restricting private, unmonitored access between the accused and their lawyers.
Throughout, Baguma’s conduct has appeared arbitrary, biased, and at times openly hostile to the defence, while the legal remedies available to challenge that conduct have been foreclosed by the same judge. He has tended to conduct proceedings off the record, overruled defence objections, dismissed the recusal application, and ignored requests to refer questions of his own impartiality elsewhere. Judicial officers in Uganda enjoy broad immunity, including for conduct at the pre-trial stage that violates an accused person’s rights.
Chapter Four of the Constitution, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, sets out the protections owed to pre-trial detainees. Article 28(3)(c) and (d) guarantee adequate time to prepare a defence and the right to counsel of one’s choosing. Article 9 of the ICCPR guarantees liberty and security of person, trial within a reasonable time or release, and a right to compensation for unlawful detention.
Besigye’s challenges to his abduction from Nairobi, his rendition to Uganda, and his prosecution before the Court Martial were each, in turn, unsuccessful. Brigadier Freeman at the Court Martial, Chief Magistrate Nantege at Nakawa, and Justice Baguma at the High Court each concluded, in their own way, that the violations alleged against the state ranked below the imperative of proceeding with trial.
It is Baguma’s conduct of the High Court proceedings, however, that has been the most consequential. His rulings have tracked prosecution goals more closely than the requirements of a fair trial, and his record so far suggests a judge unable or unwilling to correct course.
The Trial Opens Without a Defence
The Trial Opens Without a Defence
The events of this week have removed the last ambiguity about the character of these proceedings. The trial opened before Justice Baguma with the defence dismantled in advance. Senior Counsel Erias Lukwago, the lead defence counsel, was seized from his home in Wakaliga in June 2026 by the Special Forces Command, on the direct and published orders of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, after he attempted to serve court process on the General in connection with this case. Lukwago was held blindfolded and unacknowledged for two days, charged with misprision of treason, and remanded to Luzira, the prison that holds his own client.
With the lead counsel imprisoned and the remainder of the team absent, the court proceeded. A prosecution witness, Andrew Wilson Orlando, was placed on the stand and gave evidence with no defence lawyer present to object or to cross-examine. This is not a defect in the trial. It is the negation of the thing a trial is. Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the accused the right to counsel of his own choosing and the right to examine the witnesses against him. Evidence taken from a prosecution witness while the accused sits without a lawyer satisfies neither guarantee, and a record built on it is a record built on sand.
Then Dr Besigye collapsed. Seventy years old, handcuffed, ringed by prison guards, and defending himself in a trial from which his lawyers had been removed, he went down in the dock. What the state did next is the plainest statement of its priorities in the entire history of this case. Soldiers denied his personal physician, Dr Olive Kobusingye, access to him. He was loaded into an ill-equipped ambulance and driven not to a hospital but to Mbuya Military Barracks. Only late that night was he moved to Mulago National Referral Hospital and placed in intensive care, where his physician was at last permitted to see him. For hours, a collapsed elderly man in state custody was held from his doctor and taken to a barracks, and the reason offered was none.
The collapse did not occur in a vacuum. For over a year the Chief of Defence Forces has published his intentions toward this prisoner in his own words, that Dr Besigye should die on Heroes’ Day, that only the President prevents his execution, that he is a dead man walking. When the man who commands the army says these things, and the man they concern then collapses in state custody and is driven to that army’s barracks with his doctor barred, the line between rhetoric and method thins to not
The International Response
The domestic courts have foreclosed every remedy the defence has sought. The Institute for Justice and Accountability in Uganda has therefore carried the case beyond them. On 29 July 2026 iJA filed an individual communication with the United Nations Human Rights Committee on behalf of Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale, under the Optional Protocol to the Covenant, with an urgent request for interim measures to compel disclosure of Dr Besigye’s condition and whereabouts, access for his physicians and counsel, and the suspension of a trial conducted without a defence. iJA has separately placed the cases of Dr Besigye, Mr Lutale, Senior Counsel Lukwago, and the disappeared opposition organiser Sam Mugumya before the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, with urgent action requested.
These filings do not ask the United Nations to admire Uganda’s Constitution. They ask it to record that the state has abandoned it. The evidence for that abandonment is not iJA’s to manufacture. It is written on the trial record, in the empty chair where the defence should sit, and in the ambulance that turned toward a barracks.
Who Is Kizza Besigye?
Kizza Besigye is a physician better known for his politics than his medicine. Politics has shaped the man: from ally and personal physician to Yoweri Museveni during the 1980s bush war, to his most enduring political adversary.
Born in Rukungiri District in 1956 to a middle-class family, Besigye initially hoped to become an accountant before training in human medicine at Makerere University, graduating in 1980. He supported Museveni’s Uganda Patriotic Movement in the contested 1980 election and followed him into the bush war against Milton Obote’s government, relocating via Nairobi after surviving detention and torture at the International Conference Centre, now the Serena Hotel.
After the National Resistance Army took power in 1986, Besigye served as Minister of State for Internal Affairs and National Political Commissar in the Office of the President. He left government for good in 1989, posted to Bombo for military training.
Those who know him describe a quiet, self-effacing man, qualities that served him well navigating the internal politics of a guerrilla movement and, briefly, of government. By the time he was removed from his post as Political Commissar, without a formal handover, friction with Museveni had already set in over a stalled political transition Museveni was, by most accounts, deliberately delaying.
From Bombo, Besigye was deployed as Armoured Brigade Commander in Masaka in 1991, later serving as Chief of Logistics and Engineering, before joining the 284-member Constituent Assembly that drafted the 1995 Constitution. It was there that his political reputation sharpened, built on rigorous and combative debate.
His 1999 dossier, An Insider’s View of How the NRM Lost the Broad Base, infuriated Museveni so deeply that he ordered Besigye court-martialled. From that year forward, Besigye’s relationship with Museveni was transformed, from ally to adversary, in a rivalry that has tested the limits of Uganda’s constitutional order, exposed the fragility of its institutions, and undercut any claim that Museveni governs as a democrat.
Besigye argued that the Movement System had lost its way and required a new liberation struggle, a position that placed him squarely in the path of Museveni’s authoritarianism. In 2000, facing threats of court martial over the dossier, he announced his candidacy against Museveni in the 2001 presidential election.
For the twenty-five years since, Besigye’s political life has been defined by surveillance, repeated arrest, multiple imprisonments on a shifting roster of charges, and sustained harassment. The current treason prosecution is the third such ordeal he has endured in two decades.
He is admired for his refusal to capitulate, a figure shaped, more than any other Ugandan political leader of his generation, by direct confrontation with military rule. His political identity rests on opposition to rule by force, advocacy for democratic reform, and a long campaign for genuine multiparty politics, an identity hardened, it is fair to say, as much by Museveni’s intransigence as by Besigye’s own convictions.
After the violent 2001 election, Besigye faced repression unlike anything Uganda had previously seen and fled twenty-four-hour military surveillance at his home in Luzira, going into exile and eventually settling in South Africa. He returned to Uganda on 26 October 2005, after which Museveni made dismantling Besigye’s political career a sustained personal objective, deploying the army and police toward that end.
Besigye later allied with NRM-aligned members of Parliament connected to the Parliamentary Advocacy Forum and the National Democrats Forum, contributing to the largest exodus from the ruling party and helping shape what became Uganda’s long-standing political opposition. His commitment to a revolutionary return of power to the people runs deep, both ideologically and personally.
Across his years in opposition, Besigye has balanced activism with discipline, never rushing toward confrontation with a population he believed had not yet been sufficiently organised or informed. After three unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Museveni, he concluded that elections in Uganda function less as a political contest than as a military operation, and turned instead to civil resistance as the more realistic route to political change, a method he has argued would eventually compel the security forces to submit to civilian authority.
Though he has consistently renounced violence and armed rebellion, his embrace of civil disobedience has repeatedly brought him into conflict with the law. It was the Walk to Work protests, launched after the 2011 election, that began the sequence of arrests, charges, and imprisonments so extensive that Besigye says he has lost count.
Dismantling an entrenched military government, Besigye has come to understand, takes time, and his approach, built on patience and trust, carries its own costs: the longer the struggle continues, the more people grow compromised or disillusioned along the way. He has absorbed, with evident stoicism, the personal cost of confronting a government built on military force.
Besigye was nominated as a presidential candidate in 2005 while detained at Luzira Prison on charges of rape and treason, released on bail two months after campaigning began, and given roughly a month to campaign nationwide against an incumbent who had been on the trail far longer.
His 2006 rape trial ended in acquittal, and the presiding judge, Justice John Bosco Katutsi, did not mince words. Katutsi found that the state’s case carried ulterior motives, that the police investigation led by CID Director Elizabeth Kutesa was “crude and amateurish,” and that the prosecution’s key witness, Joanita Kyakuwa, had given testimony riddled with lies, inconsistencies, and anomalies. In acquitting Besigye, Katutsi described the evidence as wholly inadequate to support any serious charge, “scandalous if brought forward… monstrous if to ruin the honour of one who offered himself as a candidate for the highest office of this country.”
Katutsi’s ruling exposed what was, in substance, a state effort to use rape charges and the courts to destroy a political opponent. He later withdrew from presiding over Besigye’s subsequent treason trial after being accused within government of favouring Besigye because the two men share a home district, Rukungiri.
Whose Duty Is It to Stop Injustice in Court?
As Uganda’s courts have grown more deeply entangled with the ruling party, the question of who is responsible for checking judicial bias and incompetence has become more pressing, not less.
Judicial officers operating within a military-dominated state structure often understand judicial independence narrowly, and many defer, whether explicitly or by habit, to the Attorney General’s office or other political authorities when high-stakes political cases arise. In such cases, domestic law has tended to favour the government over the accused, a pattern that has tilted the scales against Besigye in a trial where the presiding judge’s independence and competence are themselves in dispute.
Without sustained public pressure to loosen the executive’s grip on the judiciary, securing justice in politically charged cases will remain difficult, now and for years to come. If pressure on the executive proves insufficient, it must be directed at the judiciary itself. Judges should have reason to fear the consequences of taking orders from the executive, not merely the consequences of resisting them.
Despite everything Besigye and his co-accused now face, he appears resolved to continue. That resolve carries real risk: Museveni may yet use Justice Baguma to secure the conviction and reputational ruin that Justice Katutsi, two decades earlier, refused to provide. What Katutsi declined to do, Baguma may yet be willing to complete.
When Katutsi was assigned as trial judge in Besigye’s earlier treason case, following his acquittal ruling on the rape charge, he chose to withdraw rather than proceed, later explaining that he had been accused within government of favouring Besigye because they share a home district.
Besigye remains, by most measures, one of the most significant political figures Uganda has produced. The treatment he has endured at the hands of the state he once served diminishes not his legacy, but the government that has pursued him.
Ronald Muhinda is Director of Communications and Publications at the Institute for Justice and Accountability in Uganda (iJA).