A lawyer in Uganda, representing a client accused of treason, has now been charged with a related offence. This development, reported live, is not merely a legal curiosity. It is a perfect tableau vivant of the absurdities that attend any state’s struggle for survival against its own contradictions.
The Ugandan judiciary, already a stage for high drama between executive power and due process, now finds itself prosecuting the very men who would defend others accused of undermining the state. This is not the first time history has served such a dish. In the late Roman Republic, advocates for the Catilinarian conspirators found themselves accused of the same sedition they were paid to argue against.
In the Victorian era, counsel for Irish nationalists were routinely harried as fellow travellers of treason. The logic is ancient: if you defend the serpent, you must share its venom. But the deeper ailment here is not the charge itself, but what it reveals about a polity that cannot distinguish between a lawyer’s brief and a client’s crime.
A robust state does not fear its own courts; a decadent one prosecutes the dialogue. Uganda’s lawyers now face a choice: cease to engage with the most consequential cases, or risk becoming defendants themselves. Either way, the rule of law - that frail, noble English inheritance - takes a beating.
And the mob, ever eager for simplicity, will cheer the detention while missing the deeper treason: the state’s betrayal of its own foundational principles.
