President Museveni has defended government’s decision not to renew the mandate of the United Nations Human Rights office in the country saying it was creating confusion.
“There is what we call superfluous – something that is not needed because there is something else,” Museveni told journalists in South Africa where he was addressing a press briefing on his state visit.
“Because we have got the Uganda Human Right Commission which is in the constitution, having this freelance something even confuses our people. If they have complaints, they don’t know where to go, whether the exotic thing or UHRC.”
Museveni therefore said the decision to close the UN human rights office in Uganda was to do away with the confusion it had created among the members of the public.
“So, to simplify for them, we said there is only one human rights commission in Uganda which is the one in the constitution. Let others go and do something else.”
According to Museveni, the UN Human Rights office can be put in other countries that urgently need it and not particularly Uganda .
“There is a lot of need for those groups in the world. They can go to Iraq or Afghanistan. They are not short of people and problems but Uganda is not one of them.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs earlier this month said the country has enough and strong institutions as well as civil society to monitor the human rights situation in the country.
The ministry said government will continue cooperating with the UN human rights office either directly or through its Permanent Mission in Geneva.
UN Human Rights office
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is a department of the secretariat of the United Nations that works to promote and protect human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
The office was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993.
In Uganda, the UN Human Rights office was established in 2006, with an initial mandate on the human rights situation in the conflict-affected areas in Northern and North-Eastern Uganda.
The mandate was three years later in 2009 expanded to cover the entire country and all human rights issues.
In February 2020, the mandate for the office was further expanded to include the establishment of a regional human rights training centre in Uganda, to provide training activities on the international human rights system for government officials of interested states in the region, as well as national human rights institutions and civil society organizations.
