KAMPALA, Uganda — A prominent Ugandan academic has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after being found guilty of cyberharassment for a series of Facebook posts criticizing President Yoweri Museveni, including calling him “a pair of buttocks.”

The verdict on Friday against Stella Nyanzi, a university lecturer and researcher, drew the ire of rights activists, who accused the government of using laws about electronic communications to stifle political dissent.

Joan Nyanyuki, director for East Africa at Amnesty International, said, “This verdict is outrageous and flies in the face of Uganda’s obligations to uphold the right to freedom of expression.” She added that it “demonstrates the depths of the government’s intolerance of criticism.”

The Computer Misuse Act “has been used systematically to harass, intimidate and stifle government critics,” Ms. Nyanyuki added.

The verdict and the sentence should be quashed and Dr. Nyanzi, who has been in jail since November, freed immediately, Amnesty said.

Dr. Nyanzi, who was a research fellow at Makerere University in Kampala, has drawn the government’s wrath for her attacks on him and her commentary, laced with profanity, that was posted on her Facebook page and often shared widely.

In 2017, Uganda’s top prosecutor sought to use a colonial-era law, once used by the British to quash African resistance, to commit the academic to a mental institution.
It was only the second time in recent memory that the law, the Mental Treatment Act of 1938, had been invoked in a case over free speech, according to lawyers. The first involved a student who was forcibly taken several times to a psychiatric hospital after lampooning the president on social media.

Dr. Nyanzi, left, in court in Kampala, Uganda, in 2017. Prosecutors previously pursued her using colonial-era mental health legislation.
Dr. Nyanzi, left, in court in Kampala, Uganda, in 2017. Prosecutors previously pursued her using colonial-era mental health legislation.CreditGael Grilhot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Dr. Nyanzi attended her sentencing session on Friday in a court in the center of Kampala, the capital, via video link from a maximum-security prison by the shores of Lake Victoria on the city’s outskirts. She shouted vulgarities and flashed her breasts and a double middle finger on several occasions during the session.

Her conviction stemmed from a Facebook post last year in which she said she wished Mr. Museveni, 74, had been burned up in his mother’s birth canal.

Security forces detained Dr. Nyanzi as she left a Rotary Club event in Kampala, where she had given a talk on providing schoolgirls with sanitary pads, a subject over which she has publicly argued with Mr. Museveni’s wife, Janet, who is the education minister.

Dr. Nyanzi was held for 18 hours and beaten, her lawyer, Nicholas Opiyo, told The New York Times in 2017. She was charged with writing posts that “disturbed the peace, quiet or the right of his privacy of his excellency the president of Uganda Yoweri Kaguta Museveni with no purpose of legitimate communication.”

Dr. Nyanzi’s Facebook posts contain profanity-laced vitriol about the president and his wife (whom Ms. Nyanzi describes as having a “tiny brain” the size of a sexual organ), as well as academic studies of “Radical Rudeness” and the “Necessity of Political Vulgarity” — political tactics Ugandans once used to resist British imperialism.

“Know our rich history before you think I am the first fighter with words,” Dr. Nyanzi wrote in one post.

She wrote in her most recent post, a poem about her court case: “My presence in your Court as a suspect and prisoner highlights multiple facets of dictatorship. I exposed the entrenchment of autocracy. I refuse to be a mere spectator in the struggle to oust the worst dictator.”


Another lawyer for Dr. Nyanzi said she had yet to decide on whether to appeal her conviction.

Critics say that Mr. Museveni is increasingly becoming intolerant of dissent as resistance to his rule grows.

Mr. Museveni, still in power 31 years after setting out as a great hope for African democracy, routinely intimidates dissidents and journalists. Live broadcasts of demonstrations are banned, and social media is blocked during elections that are already deeply flawed.




https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/world/africa/uganda-stella-nyanzi-jail.amp.html