Karua's woes in Uganda make a mockery of EAC

People's Liberation Party leader Martha Karua addresses the Press at JKIA in Nairobi after deportation from Uganda, June 22, 2026. [Edward Kiplimo, Standard]

The recent detention of Senior Counsel Martha Karua at Entebbe International Airport is an affront not only to her as a lawyer, but to every principle the East African Community (EAC) claims to uphold. 

Ms Karua was travelling to defend lawyer Erias Lukwago, with whom she has been representing detained Uganda’s opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who is on trial for treason. Through this incident, Uganda did not simply turn away a visitor. Poignantly, it turned away a lawyer on her way to court.

This is not the first time Karua has been mistreated in a neighbouring East African state. In 2024, she was detained and deported from Tanzania where she had planned to attend the treason trial of opposition leader Tundu Lissu. Her deportation and the mistreatment of activists from Kenya and Uganda drew global condemnation but lessons, it seems, were never learned.

Prominent lawyers and democracy advocates are increasingly being treated as threats whenever they cross borders within the EAC. The sovereignty argument; that every state controls its borders, is technically sound but dishonest when deployed selectively against human rights defenders.

Advocate Danstan Omari has rightly pointed out the asymmetry at the heart of this crisis. Kenya opens its courts to lawyers from Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi while Kenyan advocates encounter walls. Senior Counsel Muthomi Thiankolu has asked, with bluntness, what Kenyan lawyers actually gain from paying subscriptions to the East African Law Society when reciprocity remains a fiction. Both questions deserve urgent institutional answers.

The EAC was built on promises of free movement, mutual respect, and shared prosperity. What Karua encountered at Entebbe is the distance between those promises and the reality. Until regional bodies enforce accountability rather than merely issue statements, integration will remain a slogan.