FINAL (SUMMER) INTERNSHIP REPORT BY EMMANUEL EKIBA BAGENDA

On secondment by the International Human Rights Program (at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law), I served as an intern with the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) during the summer of 2006. My internship lasted from May to August and, during this time, I worked under the immediate supervision of Mrs Christine Birabwa Nsubuga (who heads the Legal and Tribunals Section of the UHRC) and Mr Remmy Beauregard (who is the UHRC’s Institutional Development Advisor).

Substantive Engagements
The main project on which I worked during the internship was a comparative analysis between the UHRC’s legal framework and that of other national (and provincial) human rights commissions in a range of countries, including Malawi, South Africa, Canada, and Ghana. The primary aim of all this was to highlight ways in which the UHRC’s legal framework could be buttressed in a manner that facilitated the promotion of human rights in Uganda. The working hypothesis, in other words, was that the UHRC could overcome some of the institutional and substantive challenges it faced by drawing upon the normative frameworks of its correspondent institutions in other jurisdictions.
Background work on this particular project had been done by the University of Toronto Working Group on Uganda, and had yielded an initial framework of responses to be refined by concrete experiences acquired during the internship. In refining the initial report by the Working Group, I had immense guidance and assistance given by Mrs Nsubuga, Mr Beauregard. I also drew extensively upon the human and material resources available at the UHRC library. Finally, I benefitted tremendously from a Workshop organized by the UHRC’s Legal and Tribunals Section, during which there were numerous helpful exchanges on the challenges facing the Commission and