More than 1,000 human rights violation cases are pending hearing by the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) tribunal.
The Commission’s Director in charge of Complaints, Investigations and Legal Services, Pauline Nasamba Mutumba, says that some of the cases date back to the early 2000s.
Out of the 18 cases that were handled by the tribunal in Soroti, 10 had spent at least 15 years in the tribunal.
Although four of the complaints were concluded and the judgment delivered, the fate of 14 others remains uncertain.
Nasamba told the journalists in Soroti that in addition to the pending cases, the commission has another batch of more than 800 cases under investigation. She, however, notes that the commission has planned for regular tribunal sittings to address the case backlog.
For the Soroti Regional Office that covers 19 districts of Teso, Sebei, and Bugisu sub-regions, the commission has 164 human rights violation cases pending hearing and another 76 cases under investigation.
In 2022, the UHRC Chairperson, Mariam Wangadya, told legislators that the entity was facing a funding gap that she noted was failing them in delivering on their mandate.
However, in the Auditor General Report of 2024 on the extent of implementation of activities for which funds were availed and utilized, UHRC reportedly achieved nine outputs with 40 activities and expenditures worth UGX.792 million that were fully implemented, while three outputs with eleven activities worth UGX.17.545 billion were partially implemented.
In the same report, the commission conclusively investigated 531 complaints out of a total of 917, representing a 60% performance.
”A review of 100 files revealed delays of more than one year, with some complaints going up to 10 years before the completion of investigations. The Commission had not started on the investigation of 90 out of 681 cases (13.2%) for over five (5) years,” the report reads in part.
The Auditor General, Edward Akol, noted that the analysis in the disposal of complaints by the UHRC tribunal in the financial year 2023/2024 indicated that out of 1,325 cases brought forward, only 171 (13%) cases were closed.
The report showed that complaints lodged to UHRC spend an average of four years at the tribunal between the first hearing and the last tribunal decision, and more than 97% of the total cases pending at the tribunal level were six years old or more.
