Our Mandate

To strengthen coordination and networking of LASPs, harmonisation and standardisation of legal aid service provision by the different service providers, lobbying and advocacy to facilitate a favourable legal and policy environment.

NAGURU CHILDREN REMAND HOME FACING CONGESTION

The Naguru Children remand home is very congested with over 160 children and there is urgent need to decongest the facility. This was revealed by the Justice, Law and Order Sector (JLOS) criminal working group during one of its routine inspection visits to the remand home.

The working group had previously arranged with the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development to decongest the remand home but efforts were futile. The Executive Director of the Legal Aid Clinic for the Law Development Center (LAC), Mrs. Theodora B Webale called on Legal Aid Service Providers (LASPs) within the network as well as other partners to engage in the venture of decongesting the remand home.

 

In Uganda, children below 12 years are by law precluded from criminal responsibility but have continued to be charged. Surveys carried out in Uganda estimate that 3% of children in the criminal justice system are below 12 years (UNICEF & Save the Children UK, 2000:17). Unfortunately, the Probation and Social Welfare Officers designated by Statute to monitor children on remand have also not been able to perform this function effectively and to appear in court when required. This is aggravated by lack of information from the police on children under remand, inadequate staffing in the department, and limited funding.

The backlog of cases in the court system also affects the juveniles. Whereas juveniles are brought before magistrates courts for committal, the lack of jurisdiction of magistrates in capital offences has meant that the children cannot take plea before the magistrate and as such they have been remanded for periods longer than 12 months without being charged

During a cluster meeting for the Juvenile justice on 3rd February 2014 at LASPNET secretariat, members recommended that representing the juveniles at the remand home in court and resettling them back to their families would go a long way in raising efforts to decongest the facility. There is also need to provide vocational skills to these juveniles once they leave the home to reduce instances of retrogressing into worse offenders but rather become substantial citizens. The biggest challenge in this endeavour though is the limited budget to carry out the resettlement and tracing family members of the children. In order to minimize cases of abuse to the rights of children, the meeting noted that there is need to track all children that enter into the criminal justice system.

Abuse of children’s rights has escalated in recent times and this could be partly because there is no policy on juvenile gender and child protection, but also because there is no set system to track all children that enter into the criminal justice system. Currently a team at the Law Reform Commission are in the process of reviewing the children’s act. The meeting recommended that there is need to expedite the process and also comprehensively address child protection concerns within the act.

 

The Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development has a challenge of incorporating all needs of children as a vulnerable group, to go beyond only the needs of the orphans and vulnerable children.

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