Jailed Opposition leader Kizza Besigye and his aide Obeid Lutale applied to be released on bail five months after their Nairobi abduction and eventual remand to Luzira prison.
Their first bail application was heard and rejected by Justice Rosette Comfort Kania in April this year. By then, he had spent 147 days in incarceration following his arrest in Nairobi on November 16, 2024. In their maiden bail application, some of the grounds raised for release included; being of advanced age of 68, and therefore not able to manage the harsh conditions of jail; being in unlawful detention for over 150 days at the time of filing the bail application, and yet he hadn’t been committed to the High Court for trial, hence his pre-trial remand period was unknown.
But presiding judge Kania, on April 11, would go on to deny bail to Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale. The jurist reasoned that although Dr Besigye and his co-accused had met the threshold for bail, they would not regain their temporary freedom. She cited two reasons for the denial of there being a high likelihood for Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale to interfere with the incomplete investigations, given their high standing in society, and also that the charges of treason they face are grave in nature.
But following Justice Kania’s denial of bail to Dr Besigye, several constitutional lawyers poked holes into the ruling.
They claimed Justice Kania’s bail ruling was not premised on any law of the land before suspecting that she could have been influenced by the powers that be.
But Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale didn’t relent. The following month, they moved to Nakawa Chief Magistrate’s Court to release them on mandatory bail, reasoning that they had clocked 180 days on remand without trial. The presiding chief magistrate on May 29 ruled that she lacked jurisdiction in line with the 2022 bail guidelines to release suspects who face capital charges like treason, which Besigye is battling. She reasoned that such powers are vested in the High Court.
Still, Dr Besigye and Mr Lutale didn’t relent as they made a similar application for mandatory bail release before the Criminal Division of the High Court.
The file was allocated to Justice Emmanuel Baguma. In his ruling on August 8, Justice Baguma held that Dr Besigye and his co-accused hadn’t made the 180 mandatory days on remand without trial. He observed that as far as he is concerned, the counting of remand days in the treason case started running on February 21, 2025, the day they were charged with treason before Nakawa Chief Magistrate’s Court and that there was nothing on court record to show that they had been in incarceration from November 16, 2024, when they were arrested in Nairobi.
Dr Besigye had argued that he had been in continuous detention from November 20, 2024, when they were first charged before the General Court Martial and remanded to Luzira prison, hence a ripe candidate to be released on mandatory bail having clocked 180 days on remand. But Justice Baguma held, ‘The evidence available before this court to enable it to calculate the time spent on remand is the lower court file from Nakawa. It shows that the charges were read to the applicants on February 21, 2025.’
At the same time, Dr Besigye and his political aide had filed another bail application, and this time, not based on mandatory bail release but as a rebound after Justice Kania had rejected the earlier one. The same bail application is still pending determination before Justice Baguma. Not much headway has been made since the defence lawyers have rejected Justice Baguma, accusing him of alleged bias, and he has also insisted on hearing the same.