ULS president Isaac Ssemakadde
ISAAC SSEMAKADDE was recently elected as the new Uganda Law Society President.
He has hit the ground running with a number of radical executive orders. In this slightly abridged speech at the 2024 ULS annual general meeting, Ssemakadde addresses the need to revive public interest law, among others.
The lack of access to justice preserves and perpetuates existing inequalities of access to education, healthcare, and access to employment opportunity.
Research shows that the inability to access legal and judicial services can be both a result and a cause of poverty and inequality. Ignorance of the rights under the law, falls in the same category as economic barriers, being tied to poverty and lack of access to education.
Access to justice, therefore, underpins all other social and economic rights. The lack of access to legal and justice services, mostly affects low-income and other disadvantaged groups, which in extreme cases can result in civil strife and increase poverty significantly.
In Uganda we have seen a steady increase in social unrest as a result of blowing inequality in access to life-sustaining essentials like healthcare, education, protection of the state, as well as life enhancing opportunities like jobs and businesses.
We look at those with formal jobs paid for by the taxpayer, and we look at the arrogance with which they treat, demean, and degrade us as if they worked for all that.
So, we are getting back on track and those tables paid for by the taxpayer, shall be banged. It is in the public interest therefore, to increase access to justice. As a public interest attorney, it is clear to me that increasing access to justice must be a primary goal of the radical new bar.
So how do we proceed?
We proceed by removing the systemic barriers to access to justice. Many are economic barriers, in that most people cannot afford legal advice. So, there must be legal aid clinics, but the Centre for Legal Aid was closed by political action. How accessible are legal aid clinics if they are so vulnerable to political action and political sanctions?
What incentives does Uganda Law Society (ULS) offer to advocates to offer pro bono legal aid to the public? In the course of my travel across the country, campaigning for the position of ULS president, I chanced upon a lady in Kasese called Confidence Biira. She is already recognized as a leader in her community, she is a councilor at the district.
She took us to see the flood sites caused by River Nyamwamba. We stood where once a school was. When we asked her what kind of law do you practice? She said, “I live in the city, and I practice city law.” I asked her: “Have you heard about climate change adaptation? Have you heard about the Great Rivers’ Network? It was strange to her, and I said, “I am standing to lift women like you and show you such opportunities.”
Another example is Mary Gorreth Nakamya, who has a heart for social justice, but she is worried, how it works, and the bar has no answers except fake outfits like Female Lawyers’ Network. End them, return to the bar. Return our ladies to the mainstream bar. We encourage a proactive approach to injustice.
Under my tenure, advocacy will be encouraged to address rights abuses by representing victims of state negligence and corruption as I have done for the last decade. Where state negligence causes citizens to lose their lives and their children to lose their livelihood, it is incumbent on us lawyers to use the means within our profession to represent them and all potential future victims and hold responsible public bodies to account.
Whether it be death by falling in an open manhole as I did for Cissy Namukasa, who was ignored by FIDA, and all others. Or by a landslide at landfill after which FLN failed to make a statement about Dorothy Kisaka. Adjust or get pushed off, the young won’t wait, the women won’t wait, it’s their time.
Or a poorly maintained bridge, as I found out in my crisscrossing the northern part of the country. When I sat under the legendary tree for a cultural discussion in Gulu, I was asked, “Isaac, what solutions does the bar have for the charge to access our homes, per person, per car?” The errors, weaknesses, and negligence of a public body that cannot maintain the bridges.
There is a solution, communities must not be told unreasonably or irrationally without making a holistic assessment of a project. The victims must be represented and the duty and care of the agency concern, properly, strictly, firmly established. Even though right now court orders don’t count for much.
The fight for doctrinal purity must not be compromised. Simply because we are still under the rotten tomatoes and dead woods in the judiciary, don’t give up the fight. Lawyers do not give up the fight. It turns out that the most cumbersome conditions, make the finest lawyers.
So, what have you been waiting for? Celebrate your age. Persistent drug stock-outs have not been a concern of the bar, the old dinosaur bar, but it is a foremost concern of the radical new bar. All students must have a table to bang.
Indeed, this issue of lack of classrooms and inability to provide basic needs, existing side by side with the ability to provide more and more graces and favours to public servants is a rights abuse that currently goes unchallenged by those best able to challenge it unconstitutionally, and their shameful faces, shameful hearts, cannot allow them to be here to take it like men and women.
But we have received a radical mandate, we have received a lion killers’ mandate and we intend to exercise it without fear or favor in the best interest of the people we serve and from whom the bar gets its legitimacy. So, ribbon cutting is over, pranking around in suits and funny ties is over.
Another systemic barrier to justice is intimidation. The intimidation of victims and their advocates by various players in the justice system, and these must be addressed by an iron hand. I am sick and tired of being sick of and tired of being intimidated. We must unite in interest on this.
If you want us to compromise to your values, you must be clear to the reality of intimidation of the victims and their advocates. This is not an impossible task if lawyers stand together as a professional body. But we are at a point where advocates shy away from everything, and they even promote shyness as a value vacuum.
For those who have shied away from cases of land grabbing by the powerful, we are back on track. For those who have shied away from any case for any situation for which a professional independent bar could have given you mental, we are back on track. I and the executive I lead, have one client now, the bar.
I have arrived, call me at 3 am and report your rotten tomatoes, and dead wood. I have been given a mandate and I intend to use it to the maximum. We shall no longer discriminate what pains and wounds the public. Surveyors who were worrying of taking commissions that involve land disputes, don’t worry we shall return clarity to your practice.
The law society is in a position to deescalate these and other growing social problems by using the powers granted to us by our profession. It is well within our means to offer services to victims of intimidation, and institutional protection to advocates who are being intimidated.
We have law firms and law firm institutions endangered by a failure to transform our laws to the present reality. We must decolonize, democratize and digitally transform how we practice the law.
So, I want to restate that offering institutional protection to advocates being intimidated, is what motivated me to stand. I made it a point to explain my persecution story to all of you who cared to listen, and you shared back yours and you voted properly. So, you deserve a full execution of the mandate you have given us, a lion killers’ mandate, a bully beater’s mandate.
Where there is scope, the law society can and should write legal opinions on dubious legal judgements and rulings. In a judiciary, parliament and in the various organs and agencies of the executive. However, we need to be more proactive defenders of political and human rights.
Uganda Law Society can begin by embracing public interest law as a practice; the way commercial or property law are respected. Public interest law has not been featured so much at the ULS annual conferences, or awards for innovation, excellence and achievement for the past six years.
That shows you the low priority accorded to public interest law. In fact, there is no better testimony to the bar’s retreat from the public interest law, than the formation of an organization called Center for Public Interest Law by a former president of the bar, Francis Gimara. Public interest law is back to the bar, we are back on track.
I thank you all for your endorsements and other support, and look forward to working with you for the Uganda we all want.
Source: The Observer
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