Martha Karua, Dr Kizza Besigye and the case that crossed borders

Senior Counsel Martha Karua (left) and colleague Erias Lukwago, the lead defence counsel in the ongoing Dr Kizza Besigye trial. COURTESY PHOTO. Kenyan constitutional lawyer and veteran politician Martha Karua embraced the brief to defend Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye after his abduction from Nairobi in November 2024. Nearly two years later, she finds herself barred from entering Uganda, in a legal and political saga that is testing the boundaries of justice, sovereignty and regional integration, reports Ronald Musoke For regular flyers around East Africa, especially lawyers, the Nairobi-Entebbe route is almost routine. The morning flight is usually filled with business executives, government officials, aid workers and advocates shuttling between two capitals separated by barely an hour in the air. On most days, passengers disembark, clear immigration, collect their luggage and disappear into Kampala before the memory of the flight has had time to settle. June 22, 2026, began no differently for veteran Kenyan constitutional lawyer Martha Karua. Kenya Airways Flight KQ420 touched down at Entebbe International Airport shortly before nine o’clock that morning. Among its passengers was Karua, who was travelling along with Charles Kanjama, the president of the Law Society of Kenya, advocate John Gicheru and another colleague. They were coming to Kampala on legal business. For Karua, it was another familiar commute across one of East Africa’s busiest borders. For more than a year, she has travelled repeatedly between Nairobi and Kampala, sometimes returning home the same evening after court, at other times spending the night before flying back the following day. Nothing about this journey suggested it would be different. Like every arriving passenger, Karua completed Uganda’s current Ebola surveillance declaration before joining the immigration queue. Her passport was examined, stamped and returned. With clearance granted, she walked into the arrivals hall and waited beside the baggage carousel for her suitcase. In her mind, she thought the formalities were over. But, a few moments later, an immigration officer approached her. “She told me she had made a mistake to clear me, and there was a note on me,” Karua would later recall. The explanation was as brief as it was bewildering. What note? Who had written it? Why had it surfaced only after she had already been admitted into Uganda? No answers were forthcoming. Instead, Karua was escorted away from the baggage carousel to the office of the Principal Immigration Officer. Before anyone explained why she had been stopped, two junior immigration officers confiscated her mobile phones. Her travelling companions continued into Uganda. She did not. Officials informed her that she would not be permitted to enter the country for what they described only as “security reasons”. Later, she was handed a document declaring her persona non grata and instructed to return to Nairobi on the next available Kenya Airways flight. “I was not going as a lawyer,” Karua explained the following morning during an interview with NTV Kenya. “I was actually going as an observer.” She had travelled, she said, to attend a court appearance involving her colleague Erias Lukwago, the former Lord Mayor of Kampala and one of Uganda’s leading constitutional lawyers, who had himself been arrested only days earlier and charged with “misprision of treason”. Instead, Karua never left the airport. For many travellers, a denied entry stamp marks the beginning and end of an unfortunate journey. For Karua, it marked the culmination of another journey altogether. One that had begun 19 months earlier. Not at an airport. Not inside a courtroom. But at the launch of her autobiography. Martha Karua, draped with the Kenyan national flag, at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport shortly after her forced return from Uganda on June 22, 2026. She carried a note that declared her “persona non Grata” by the Ugandan state. COURTESY PHOTO/THE LAW SOCIETY OF KENYA X HANDLE. The book launch invitation On the afternoon of November 17, 2024, Nairobi’s Serena Hotel was preparing for an event that promised to be equal parts literary celebration and political reunion. Guests were expected from across East Africa. Diplomats, lawyers, judges, politicians and civil society leaders would gather to celebrate the publication of Martha Karua’s autobiography titled “ Against the Tide: My Journey on a Less Trodden Path”. Few public figures in the region embodied the book’s title more convincingly than its author. For nearly four decades, Karua has built a career resisting political expediency in favour of constitutional principle, earning admiration from supporters and opponents alike for her tenacity in public life. Among those expected to speak was Uganda’s opposition leader, Dr Kizza Besigye. The invitation carried more than ceremonial significance. Besigye and Karua belong to a generation of East African politicians whose careers have become intertwined with the unfinished democratic ambitions of their respective countries. If Karua has become one of Kenya’s most recognised constitutional reformers, Besigye has spent nearly a quarter of a century as Uganda’s most persistent opposition figure. Ironically, the man who would become President Yoweri Museveni’s fiercest political rival had once been one of his closest allies. A medical doctor by training, Besigye served as Museveni’s personal doctor during the National Resistance Army’s bush war before the rebels captured power at the beginning of 1986. Their political paths would eventually diverge dramatically. Besigye accused Museveni’s government of abandoning the democratic ideals for which the war had ostensibly been fought. Museveni’s supporters, in turn, accused Besigye of seeking power through confrontation rather than dialogue. Over the next two decades, Besigye challenged Museveni in four presidential elections—2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016—losing each contest while rejecting the official results. Arrests, court appearances, police barricades and confrontations with security agencies became familiar episodes in a political career defined as much by resistance as by electoral politics. To millions of his supporters, Besigye became the enduring face of Uganda’s democratic opposition. To the state, he remained one of its most uncompromising critics. When Besigye accepted Karua’s invitation to speak at the launch of her autobiography, few could have imagined that he would never reach the podium. According to his lawyers, Besigye disappeared from an apartment complex in Nairobi on November 16. Alongside his political aide, Haji Obeid Lutale, he vanished without trace. For four days, neither family members nor lawyers knew where the two men were. Rumours spread rapidly across Nairobi and Kampala. Had he gone underground? Had he been arrested? Had he crossed another border? No one seemed to know. Then, on November 20, the mystery ended as abruptly as it had begun. Besigye resurfaced; not in Kenya, but before the General Court Martial in Makindye, in Kampala. The courtroom appearance stunned colleagues who had spent days searching for him. Standing in the dock beside Lutale, Besigye faced charges relating to national security and the unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition. He challenged both the accusations and the jurisdiction of the military court to try a civilian. Outside the courtroom, another question lingered. How had one of East Africa’s best-known opposition leaders travelled from Nairobi to military custody in Kampala without anyone—including his own lawyers—knowing where he was? The answers would become the subject of legal arguments, diplomatic denials and international scrutiny. For Martha Karua, however, the immediate question was more straightforward. Karua, a lawyer, had watched a prominent political leader disappear, and now that leader was in prison. Whatever political storm lay ahead, one principle remained unchanged. Every accused person is entitled to a lawyer. Karua accepted the brief, which perhaps has become one of the most consequential decisions of her legal career. The brief For Karua, taking Kizza Besigye’s case was never simply about representing another politician. It was about defending a principle. Across four decades in public life, Karua has built her reputation on the belief that constitutional democracy lives or dies on whether the law protects those who need it least as much as those who need it most. Governments, she has often argued, are judged not by how they treat the popular or the powerful, but by how faithfully they uphold the rights of those standing in the dock. In this photo taken in December 2024, Martha Karua interacts with her clients, Dr Kizza Besigye and Haji Obeid Lutale during a General Court Martial session at Makindye Military Police Barracks in Kampala. PHOTO/UGANDA RADIO NETWORK. Besigye’s case has put that conviction to its sternest test. When Karua joined the defence team, the controversy surrounding Besigye’s abduction had already spread beyond Uganda’s borders. Human rights organisations questioned the circumstances under which one of East Africa’s best-known opposition politicians had disappeared from Nairobi before reappearing in military custody in Kampala. Kenyan officials denied any involvement in his removal from the country. Ugandan authorities insisted that Besigye faced grave criminal allegations that warranted prosecution. The legal battle had begun long before the trial itself. Besigye and his political aide, Haji Obeid Lutale, first appeared before the General Court Martial in Makindye on charges relating to national security and the unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition. They challenged the military court’s jurisdiction, arguing that, as civilians, they could not lawfully be tried before a military tribunal. The jurisdictional question would become almost as significant as the charges themselves. For years, Uganda’s military courts had attracted criticism from constitutional lawyers and human rights organisations over the prosecution of civilians. Besigye’s appearance before the General Court Martial revived a debate that had simmered for years over the limits of military justice and the constitutional guarantees of a fair trial. Karua arrived in Kampala determined to fight that battle in court rather than in the court of public opinion. Her role, she repeatedly maintained, was not to pronounce on Besigye’s innocence or guilt. That responsibility belonged to the courts. Her task was to insist that whatever allegations the state wished to pursue, they had to be tested before a competent court through a process that respected the Constitution. It was a deceptively simple proposition. Yet in Uganda’s highly polarized political environment, little about Besigye’s prosecution was simple. Every court appearance attracted journalists, diplomats and activists. Television cameras gathered outside the courthouse long before proceedings began. International observers watched developments closely, while rights organisations issued statements questioning the legality of both Besigye’s alleged removal from Kenya and his continued prosecution before a military court. The Ugandan government rejected suggestions that the proceedings were politically motivated. Prosecutors argued that they possessed substantial evidence linking Besigye, Lutale and others to a sophisticated conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the government through violent means. According to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, investigators intended to present evidence alleging meetings in Switzerland, Greece and Kenya during which plans were discussed to recruit fighters, obtain weapons, train operatives and destabilise the Ugandan state. The prosecution further alleged that the conspiracy extended to requests for ricin poison, drone technology and attacks on strategic military installations. Besigye rejected the accusations. His lawyers described the prosecution as politically driven and insisted that the state’s case had been irredeemably tainted by what they characterised as his unlawful cross-border abduction from Nairobi. The courtroom thus became the meeting point of two fundamentally different narratives. To prosecutors, the case concerned an alleged conspiracy against the state. To the defence, it concerned the state’s obligation to obey its own laws even while prosecuting its fiercest critics. Karua understood that the distinction mattered. In constitutional democracies, she believed, the legitimacy of a criminal trial depends not only on the evidence presented but also on the fairness of the process itself. If due process could be suspended for political opponents, then constitutional protections risked becoming privileges extended at the discretion of the state rather than rights guaranteed to every citizen. That argument appeared to gain traction in January 2025. In a landmark ruling (Michael Kabaziguruka v Attorney General), Uganda’s Supreme Court declared that civilians could not be tried before military courts and directed that such cases be transferred to civilian courts. For Besigye’s legal team, the judgement represented a significant constitutional victory. It vindicated an argument they had advanced from the moment their client first appeared before military judges. Yet the decision did not bring Besigye’s detention to an end. His prosecution simply changed venues. The military case gave way to proceedings before the civilian courts, where prosecutors reformulated the allegations and pursued treason-related charges. Besigye remained in custody as the legal contest entered a new phase. For Karua, the flights between Nairobi and Kampala became almost routine. At times, she remained in Kampala to consult with Besigye and prepare legal strategy alongside her Ugandan colleagues. Among those colleagues was Erias Lukwago. The former Lord Mayor of Kampala is more than a celebrated opposition politician. He is one of Uganda’s most accomplished constitutional lawyers, respected even by those who disagree with his politics. Calm, meticulous and deeply experienced in public interest litigation, Lukwago became an indispensable member of Besigye’s defence team. So too did the youthful advocate, Eron Kiiza, a fearless courtroom lawyer whose willingness to challenge authority has earned him admiration within Uganda’s legal fraternity. Together, Karua, Lukwago and Kiiza represented something larger than a defence team. They embodied a cross-border legal collaboration that the East African Community has long sought to encourage; lawyers from different jurisdictions working together in pursuit of justice under a shared regional vision. None of them realised that before long, the story would no longer be confined to their client. It would begin reaching across the defence table itself. When the lawyers became the story Every political