Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has been criticized for not signing a domestic violence bill into law.
Alice Alaso, the secretary-general of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), the main opposition party in Uganda, said the president had yet to give the bill assent, despite it being passed by parliament.
It was given the green light by the Cabinet more than a year ago.
Last week the state minister for youth and children’s affairs, Jessica Alupo, said the delay was because the president was still studying the bill.
The bill will afford legal protection to people in abusive relationships for the first time.
Currently, most women have no say in affairs relating to their home life, and many have lost their lives through domestic violence.
The bill is intended to protect sufferers of domestic violence, punish perpetrators and set guidelines for courts on the protection and compensation of abused women.
Figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2007 show 68 percent of married women aged 15 to 49 had experienced some form of violence inflicted by their spouse or intimate partner.
According to the 2006 Uganda Law Reform Commission study, domestic violence is most common in northern Uganda, where it was reported to have occurred in 78 percent of homes. Most women do not report cases of domestic violence to authorities and police rarely intervene or investigate.
Often women are reluctant to file a complaint for fear of reprisal, embarrassment, poverty, ignorance of the law or not knowing where to report abuse.
A report published on the Refworld Web site, citing figures from various sources, found that 60 percent of men and 70 percent of women in Uganda condone “wife beating” if, for example a woman burns food or refuses sex.
In rural areas cases of domestic violence are often handled among the community, rather than by the police. In most cases this means women are returned home to their partners. More serious cases are passed on to sub-county leaders or the district gender officer, who may encourage police involvement.
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century BC. Archeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020. Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120m of tunnel carved out of the rock. However, that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000m2 area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’s
Soaring high across a gorge in the rugged Himalayas, a newly finished bridge would soon help India entrench control of disputed Kashmir and meet a rising strategic threat from China. The Chenab Rail Bridge, the highest of its kind in the world, has been hailed as a feat of engineering linking the restive Kashmir valley to the vast Indian plains by train for the first time. However, its completion has sparked concern among some in a territory with a long history of opposing Indian rule, already home to a permanent garrison of more than 500,000 soldiers. India’s military brass say the strategic benefits
‘RADICAL LEFT LUNATIC’: Trump earlier criticized Kamala Harris, his new opponent, calling her ‘the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called on voters to defend the country’s democracy as he explained his decision to drop his bid for re-election and throw his support behind US Vice President Kamala Harris. As “the defense of democracy is more important than any title,” Biden said that he was stepping aside to deliver an implicit repudiation of former US president Donald Trump in his first public address since his announcement on Sunday that he would not be the Democratic candidate. He did not name Trump, whom he has called an existential threat to democracy. “Nothing, nothing can come in the