104 Kabumba/Application of African Union (human rights) law in Uganda especially given the similarity between the African charter provision on liberty and article 23 of the Ugandan Constitution.86 Finally, the Court also relied on the Purohit case to strike down derogatory language in the Penal Code Act (referring to persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’), again noting that it had found the decision to be ‘persuasive’ and that its decision in the instant case was made expressly ‘following the reasoning and decision’ in Purohit.87 A notable departure from the above approach – of receptiveness to African Commission jurisprudence – was the decision of High Court Judge Musota in the Kasha case,88 in which he distinguished a number of Commission decisions from the matter before him. He, for instance, felt that the case of Law Office Ghazi Suleiman v Sudan II,89 which had been cited by counsel for the applicants, was inapplicable, in that Mr Ghazi Suleiman had not sought to exercise his freedom of expression to promote any illegality. In the instant case, according to Judge Musota, the applicants ‘were using the pretext of training in human rights advocacy to promote homosexual acts which were prohibited by the Ugandan laws’.90 Later in the judgment, Judge Musota similarly distinguished the Commission’s decision in Civil Liberties Organizations v Nigeria91 from the matter before him. According to him, while the Civil Liberties case concerned state interference in the establishment of the Nigerian Bar Association, in the case before him there had been no interference in the formation of the applicants’ various organisations – and ‘their activities were only restricted when it was established that they were using the workshop to promote prohibited and illegal acts’.92 The rather strained distinctions made by Judge Musota in the Kasha case, between the Commission’s case law and the matter before him, might have been occasioned by the Judge’s reluctance to uphold the applicants’ claim in that particular case – which broadly related to the rights of sexual minorities in Uganda – rather than a more doctrinally grounded objection to the applicability of that jurisprudence. In any case, it is significant that he distinguished, rather than rejected, the Commission’s jurisprudence urged upon him by the applicants. The above circumstances, taken together with the more robustly receptive approaches by the courts in Mulago and CEHURD and Iga, suggest that, going forward, there is a great potential role for use of the Commission’s jurisprudence in constitutional and human rights litigation in Uganda. 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 At 22-23. At 26-27. n 41. (2003) AHRLR (ACHPR 2003). At 11. 101/93, 8th Annual Activity Report 1994 – 1995. At 13.