Africa Investigates: Bribery rife in the Ugandan justice system

• Emmanuel Mutaizibwa goes undercover in Uganda’s court system

• Bribes demanded from the very first instance of reporting a crime

• Bribery revealed within the court itself, up to a senior magistrate

In the second season finale of Al Jazeera’s award-winning Africa Investigates, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa leads a team of reporters who go undercover inside Uganda’s court system to reveal the price of justice, exposing a chain of corruption that is rotting the country’s judiciary to its core.

Although the Global Corruption Perception Index ranks Uganda at 142nd out of 170 countries, the country’s law courts used to be seen as free from graft. But a recent report from the country’s Anti Corruption Coalition has confirmed an increasingly widespread view – that corruption has seeped into one of the most sacred institutions of the land.

The Al Jazeera investigation begins in Kasangati, a suburban town just north of the capital city, Kampala. The Magistrate’s Court in Kasangati plays a central role in the town, but Emmanuel and his team discover that it’s as much a place for buying and selling as the town’s market.

Emmanuel meets a number of litigants who claim that court officials had swindled money out of them. The only way to substantiate these claims is for Emmanuel to take the plunge and dive into this murky court system.

Posing as litigants and armed with undercover cameras, Emmanuel’s team climb a hierarchy of corruption, where they are forced to use bribe money to navigate past officials at every step.

Money is demanded from the very first instance of reporting a crime and the practice reaches shocking heights within the court itself, from the police up to a senior magistrate.

Emmanuel then confronts Uganda’s anti-corruption authorities with the video evidence.

“Judicial corruption eats away at the fabric of society,” says Al Jazeera English’s executive producer Diarmuid Jeffreys. “If police and court officials can be bought off, then how can they ever be trusted? That’s why this story is so important. Emmanuel’s remarkable investigation was given extra weight by ordinary citizen activists; hard-working Ugandans determined to hold the corrupt to account and protect the principle that justice should be fair, impartial and honest. “

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVLXH3ciqLQ

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Africa Investigates: Bribery rife in the Ugandan justice system

Kidnapping children for battle, from Uganda to Nigeria

They come in the night.

Armed militants take young children from their beds, as they sleep: Young recruits for extremist causes.

It happened this (last) week in Nigeria, when heavily armed Boko Haram Islamists kidnapped 200 girls from their boarding school.

And it has been happening in northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and other neighbouring countries for decades – the work of Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour covered Kony’s sick work 16 years ago, for 60 Minutes, when she reported on the abduction of 139 girls from their school.

She spoke with their teacher, Sister Rachele Fassera, who begged for the children’s return.

“He (Kony) bent down and on the ground he wrote, ‘The girls are 139. I will give you 109.’ He wrote, ‘I keep 30,’ Sister Raquelle told Amanpour at the time.”

“I knelt in front of him,” she said. “And I said, ‘please give me all the girls’. He said, ‘No’ [crying]. Then they (kidnapped girls) started, ‘Sister, they will rape us tonight. Sister, will you come back tonight?’

“That was the last time I saw them.”

That story is now the basis for a new novel, “Thirty Girls,” by the award-winning American writer Susan Minot.

“It’s an amazing story,” she told Amanpour in an interview.

“I think a lot about it. I’ve thought about it for the last 16 years, since I heard her (Sister Rachele Fassera) story. And the bravery that she went through, the horrible situation that she was in, just haunted me.”

In her own coverage of the story, Amanpour also spoke with a girl, Agnes, who had been kept by LRA commanders.

“Did you take part in punishing a girl for trying to escape?” Amanpour asked.

“All of us were made to do so.”

“What did you do?”

“They gave us firewood to beat her.”

“And did she die?”

“She died.”

“What do you think about having been made to kill somebody?”

“I’m okay at times. But at times I could think of her.”

“You still think of her?”

“Yes.”

“You see her face?”

“Yes.”

“It was unbelievable,” Minot said. “Or it wasn’t … I won’t say ‘unbelievable,’ because, again, I’ve thought about this a long time. And it turns out there’s nothing that’s really unbelievable.

“To me the most horrendous thing about it was this was going on continually and the world was not doing anything to stop it.”

Minot has previously written about the story, but never got the kind of reaction she now has, she told Amanpour.

“When I wrote my non-fiction piece, I actually never even heard a peep back about it,” she said.

“For about 20 years he (Kony) was marauding and looting and victimizing children. And so eight years ago, when I was writing this book, it was still going on. So I wanted to try to write about it as a novelist from sort of the inside out.”

There is a “human recognition,” she said, that “we’re not so very far away from the peoples’ experience.”

- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/04/kidnapping-children-battle-uganda-nigeria/#sthash.8Awh0AZG.dpuf

Kidnapping children for battle, from Uganda to Nigeria