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posted by on Thursday April 13 2017, @02:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-shame-the-government dept.

A Ugandan activist has been charged with computer-related crimes for criticizing the government on Facebook:

Stella Nyanzi, one of Uganda's most controversial academics and activists, appeared in court Monday, after being arrested and charged Friday with cyber harassment and the misuse of a computer, for "shaming" the government.

Nyanzi's latest run-in with the 31-year-old regime of President Yoweri Museveni began with a fight for free sanitary pads for school-age girls. "She's the one person who has dared to come out strongly in the country and say what many have feared to say many, many times," said Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, an LGBT rights activist, shortly after leaving the court house.

During the 2016 elections, Museveni and wife, Janet, promised to provide free pads to poor young girls across the country. [...] The elections passed; Museveni won. Earlier this year, Janet Museveni told the country's parliament the promise of free sanitary pads wasn't going to happen because the country was facing a tough economic climate. Nyanzi was furious. She decided if the government wasn't going to do it, she would give poor girls sanitary pads. So she started a crowdfunding campaign and she also unleashed a torrent of criticism toward Museveni, his wife and his supporters. Her criticisms flowed into her Facebook timeline. They were always pointed and sometimes profane. In one of them, she writes that she refuses to call the president's wife "Mama Janet," as most Ugandas do[.]


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:07PM (4 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:07PM (#493463) Journal

    By "widely believed" I mean "international third party election monitoring organizations cited widespread disenfranchisement" not "winner of the election whined about illegal votes that don't exist."

    But I get your point about glass houses and casting stones.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:39PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:39PM (#493483)

    Actually, some states are no longer classified as democracies according to Harvard professors:

    In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

    http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html [newsobserver.com]

    You can also check figure 1 in the following (by the same group as above) to see the US is about as democratic as north korea:
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2567075 [ssrn.com]

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:46PM (2 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 13 2017, @04:46PM (#493487) Journal

      Hey, guess what state I live in and why I may be a super-active campaigner for ending political districting in the US.

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:34PM (1 child)

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday April 13 2017, @07:34PM (#493583)

        How's it working for you?

        > super-active campaigner

        Is that "super-" in hours of hard community proselytizing, or in dollars of lobbying?

        • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:01PM

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:01PM (#493604) Journal

          No money, a fair amount of door-to-door.