The Commission’s Chairperson, Mariam Wandadya, who was addressing the press yesterday at the UHRC headquarters in Kampala, said the Commission received a list of 25 missing persons from the NUP leadership who were arrested and detained in different places. These were arrested and detained during and after the 2021 general elections.
Of the 25 arrested NUP supporters, the Commission said, 7 were released from prison in December last year.
Wangadya said out of the seven, 3 are under capital punishment, and 4 appeared before Court over vandalism, but were later released on bail.
Meanwhile, she revealed that the Commission is still investigating why 18 others are still missing. She urged the general public to share information regarding the missing persons with the commission.
In December last year, NUP filed a court order that they hoped would help produce a total of 25 supporters whose whereabout then was still unknown.
Addressing the media, Mathias Mpuuga, the Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LOP), said the state had continued to persecute innocent people whose only crime was disagreeing with the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party and the Government it had formed.
Mpuuga said their attempts to settle the matter through dialogue had failed and, therefore, the only option was to seek legal redress from the courts of law.
“About our talks on the fate of our comrades, who were abducted and have been missing since 2019, the government side was a no-show for the meeting yesterday (Wednesday). We instructed our attorneys to file for a writ of habeas corpus for the courts to force the government to produce these people dead or alive,” he said.