Bobi Wine’s international Lawyer Robert Amsterdam has appealed to the US government to impose sanctions against some senior officer of the Uganda Police Force over the recent arrest and detention of city Lawyer and human rights activist Nicholas Opiyo.
Opiyo, who has been held since Tuesday was picked from a restaurant in Kamwokya where he was having lunch with four colleagues before he was handcuffed and bundled into a waiting tinted glassed van.
Opiyo is the Executive Director of human rights group Chapter Four Uganda.
Police Spokesperson SP Fred Enanga would later claim that Opiyo had been picked on allegations of money laundering.
“We would like to confirm the arrest of lawyer Nicholas Opiyo by a Joint Task team of Security and Financial Intelligence, on allegations of money laundering and related malicious acts,” the police said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
“The investigations are progressing well and any new developments will be communicated in due course. He remains in our custody at the Special Investigations Division.”
But Amsterdam is not taking any of Enanga’s explanations arguing that the arrest could be a political motive to dissuade some activists against the ongoing investigations in the November 18/19 riot deaths in the country.
“Such thuggish scare tactics and trumped up charges are aimed at discouraging the investigation being led by these lawyers into the police killings of 37 protesters on the 18th and 19th of November,” Amsterdam noted
Mr Amsterdam, who has represented other notable opposition politicians such as Tanzania’s Tundu Lissu and Cameroon’s Maurice Kamto, said the US must punish the rogue police to stop what he called ‘thuggish’ treatment of opposition figures and activists.
“This action by the regime of President Yoweri Museveni represents a clear and unambiguous attack on the democratic rights of the Ugandan people,” Amsterdam wrote in a letter to Elliot Engel, the Chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and Michael McCaul the Lead Republican of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
Amsterdam’s letter to the US Congress seeks sanctions imposed under the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act which allows the President to revoke US visas and block all US-based property and interests of foreigners and foreign organisations implicated in human rights violations through extrajudicial killings, torture or any ill treatment of individuals who expose illegal activities of government officials and corrupt government officials.
Former police Chief Gen. Edward Kale Kayihura last year became the first high ranking Ugandan official to have such sanctions slammed against him by the US Department of Treasury “for using corruption and bribery to strengthen his political position, as units under his command committed serious human rights abuses.”
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