The Deputy Chief Justice, Alphonse Owiny-Dollo has blamed the lack of cooperation by the United Kingdom (U.K) over its position on the issue of death sentence for frustrating the conviction of a key suspect in the 2010 Kampala bombings trial. He said that one of the accused was acquitted as a result of UK’s dissenting views on Uganda’s death penalty laws which was a big blow to the case.
He was speaking on Friday at the 3rd Annual Joan Kagezi memorial lecture which took place at Hotel Africana in Kampala.
Joan Kagezi, a former Senior Principal State Attorney was assassinated in March 2015 in Kiwatule, a Kampala suburb while driving home in the evening. To date, the case has dragged on with no conviction of those that killed her.
Friday’s lecture which was presented by Grace Ononiwu from the Office of the Crown Prosecution Service of the United Kingdom was themed on “Combating International and Transnational Organized Crime: Lessons and Best Practices”.
At the time of her death, Kagezi was the state prosecutor in the case in which 13 people were accused of planning and executing the bomb attacks that killed over 70 people.
But the Deputy Chief Justice (DCJ) was concerned that at a critical time when Uganda required the assistance of the U.K justice system to solve the case, the latter refused to cooperate over a minor issue.
“In the trial, in which I was judge, there was one accused person who had a close shade to conviction. Very close. And as a judge, my inner feeling convinced me he was guilty. But you don’t convict on your inner feeling, you convict based on the strength of evidence adduced by the DPP,” he said.
“And I believe that the only reason this person was acquitted was because U.K refused to cooperate with the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP). They had material that would have changed circumstancial evidence to concrete evidence”.
Acording to Owiny-Dollo, the reason for the non cooperation was that Uganda’s statutory books still had the death penalty.
He argued that in view of the gravity of the threat of terrorism and the seriousness of transnational crimes that necessitate international cooperation, an issue such as the position of a country on its sentence should have been superseded.
“There should be latitude in the various countries to exercise penalties. We deal with different settings. So, it might be counterproductive to apply universal sentencing rules,” he said.
The DCJ also used the same event to decry the rampant corruption which he said has hindered the efforts by Uganda’s criminal justice system to successfully prosecute perpetrators of transnational crimes.
“For every step that those involved in combating these crimes take, the cancer of corruption takes them ten steps backwards,” the Deputy Chief Justice said in his remarks.
“When you are focused on fighting these crimes, somebody is focused on fighting what you are doing by using corrupt means”.
He added that a country whose institutions thrive on corruption can never fight organized international crime and that Uganda’s priority “will have to be cleaning the house”.
“We need to make it unthinkable to even indulge in corruption. Make it an athena,” he noted.
He alluded to Entebbe International airport which has became infamous for being a transit point for organized criminals. He attribute the gaps to the vice of bribing the authorities at the airport which has become the new normal.
On Thursday, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mike Chibita told journalists that Police had followed a wrong track of investigations into the death of Joan Kagezi. Several of the arrested suspects were later released for lack of evidence.
