By Nathan Eyagu
Soroti City lawyer Joshua Okello has taken another move against international sanctions targeting Uganda by shifting the legal battle against the United Kingdom government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, citing delays in setting a hearing date for his earlier cases.
According to Okello, ever since he filed the case against the United Kingdom government at the High Court Civil Division in Kampala over the illegal sanctions imposed on Speaker Anita Among, no hearing date has been fixed.
He added that each time he inquires about the status, he is told to wait until the judge is done with cases from 2023.
"This is not proper because the Court is mandated to fix hearing dates no matter how many files are being handled. That totally demoralized me, so I came up with the option of transferring the same case to the European Court of Human Rights," he explained.
Okello mentioned that he has completed the case filing and is now waiting for the hearing to be scheduled.
It should be noted that the European Court of Human Rights, also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court was established in 1959 and decided its first case in 1960 in Lawless v. Ireland. An application can be lodged by an individual, a group of individuals, or one or more of the other contracting states.
International law scholars consider the European Court of Human Rights to be the most effective international human rights court in the world.
