By Frank Kamuntu
Uganda’s new surveillance system, which allows the government to track the real time location of all vehicles in the country, undermines privacy rights, and creates serious risks to the rights to freedom of association and expression, Human Rights Watch said today that the government should scrap the system.
On November 1, 2023, the government initiated the “Intelligent Transport Monitoring System,” allegedly to address national security issues. The authorities say it will build on the country’s existing traffic surveillance system with a network of surveillance cameras and mandatory cellular-network-connected tracking devices on all vehicles in the country.
“Uganda’s new transport surveillance system amounts to unchecked mass surveillance of all vehicles at all times, undermining the right to privacy for millions of Ugandans,” said Oryem Nyeko, Uganda researcher at Human Rights Watch, “The government should focus on protecting its citizens’ rights instead of abusing them.”
HRW says the government has limited public scrutiny of the technical system and its capabilities and the contract with the Russian company delivering the project, and has published no plans for oversight and human rights mitigation around the project.
Since 2018, the Ugandan government has progressively expanded its surveillance capacity after President Yoweri Museveni unveiled a “nine-point security plan” to respond to a series of killings of high-profile political and government figures by unidentified people riding on motorcycles. Museveni’s plan included the introduction of electronic license plates, which he said would enable police to track down the owners of vehicles discovered to have been at crime scenes.
In 2019, the government procured US$126 million worth of closed-circuit television camera (CCTV) surveillance technology from the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to monitor public spaces across Uganda. In July 2021, the government announced that it had entered an agreement with the Joint Stock Company Global Security, a Russian-registered company, to set up the Intelligent Transport Monitoring System.
Both the government and the company will operate the system for the first 10 years, after which the company will hand it over to the government, the authorities said.
Susan Kataike, the spokesperson for the Works and Transport Ministry, told Human Rights Watch that the new system will introduce new license plate recognition and surveillance, facial recognition, and traffic density cameras, which will “complement” an already existing network of CCTV cameras operated by the police.
As part of the system, all vehicle owners will, after February 1, 2024, be required to pay between 50,000 and 714,300 Uganda shillings (about US$13 to US$190) to register their vehicles for new plates that will have an attached sim-card-equipped device provided by the state-owned telecommunications company, Uganda Telecommunications Corporation Ltd (UTL).
The device will allow the government to track the location of all registered vehicles from the police national command center in real time. Foreign vehicles temporarily in Uganda will also be required to install the tracking devices for the time they are in the country.
The system will collect data from UTL’s telecommunications network, as well as the network of a privately owned telecommunications company, increasing the number of corporate private actors with potential access to the real-time location of all vehicles in Uganda. According to HRW, this creates serious human rights and security risks.
“The scale and rate at which the Ugandan government is increasing its power to collect and store information about its citizens is alarming,” Nyeko said. “The authorities should focus on bolstering the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms instead of restricting them, and harmonize its domestic laws on limitations on the right to privacy with international law.”
Have An Advert Or Article You Want Us To Publish? Whatsapp: +256760530830.
