Kenya is looking into how a party leader in Uganda was “abducted”

Kenya’s government said it was looking into how a well-known opposition leader from Uganda was taken out of Nairobi this week. This comes as the government faces growing criticism for not protecting foreign activists on its land.

Kizza Besigye, who has been an opponent of Yoweri Museveni for a long time, went missing in the city of Kenya on Saturday. He showed up again on Wednesday at a military court in Uganda, which is nearby. He was charged with crimes like having guns without a permit.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for Uganda’s government said that the country did not kidnap people and that arrests made outside of Uganda were done with the help of host countries.

But in a TV interview, Korir Sing’oei, who is the senior secretary at Kenya’s foreign ministry, said that Besigye’s detention, which he called a “abduction,” was “not the act of the Kenyan government” and that the interior ministry was looking into it.

The Ugandan court’s charge sheet says that Besigye was caught with a gun and eight rounds of ammo in the Riverside neighborhood of Nairobi. It says that he was there looking for help to attack the military’s security.

The head of the UN’s HIV/AIDS agency, Winnie Byanyima, Besigye’s wife, said that he hasn’t held a gun in 20 years and should be tried in a civilian court instead of a military one.

Volker Turk, who is in charge of human rights at the UN, called for Besigye’s freedom. “Such abductions of Ugandan opposition leaders and supporters must stop, as must the deeply concerning practice in Uganda of prosecuting civilians in military courts,” he said in a tweet.

Kenya’s track record on human rights and international law has been criticized again because of this case.

In July, 36 members of Besigye’s political party were sent back to Uganda by Kenyan authorities, where they were charged with crimes linked to terrorism. The United Nations was unhappy when Kenya sent four Turkish refugees back to Ankara last month.

According to James Risch, the top senator from the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Besigye’s kidnapping “raises serious questions about important U.S. partners violating (international) norms” (X).

Besigye was Museveni’s doctor during the rebel war in the 1980s, but he later became a harsh critic and ran against him in four elections. His wife Byanyima said he went to Kenya to attend the launch of a book.

The International Commission of Jurists said in a statement that his transfer to Uganda “brought to mind a terrible time in East Africa’s history when state-sponsored kidnappings and cross-border renditions were the norm.”