Uganda: UEC excludes 1,000 Apaa people from 2021 election, reports Human Rights Watch

"Excluding the people of Apaa village from participating in elections would be the Ugandan government's most recent violation of their rights. The government should take urgent steps to ensure that people in Apaa are able to exercise their right to vote, while also making every effort to resolve the decade-long forced displacement of residents from the disputed land."

In a village in Northern Uganda, Apaa over thousands of natives may not be able to vote in the 2021 elections on January 14, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

It reported that due to a delay in voters' registration in the village the people may not be able to cast their votes in the election. The natives of the Apaa community have been denied many rights due to a decade-long land conflict with the government of Uganda, as per the report.

The community was excluded by Uganda's Electoral Commission in an exercise conducted to verify existing voters and adding new eligible voters between 2019 and 2020th March as reported.

However, the uncertainty persists if the natives who are registered and willing to cast votes would be able to vote in the upcoming election. Since the people cast their votes in 2016 for the last time.

The following certainty is reported as a violation of one's rights, as stated by Otsieno Namwaya, the senior African researcher at the Human Rights Watch, "excluding the people of Apaa village from participating in elections would be the Ugandan government's most recent violation of their rights. The government should take urgent steps to ensure that people in Apaa are able to exercise their right to vote, while also making every effort to resolve the decade-long forced displacement of residents from the disputed land."