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A prominent Ugandan academic was found guilty of cyberharassment and sentenced to 18 months in jail for Facebook posts insulting the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, The New York Times reported. Activists decried the sentencing of Stella Nyanzi, a lecturer and researcher at Makerere University, as a violation of her rights of free expression.
Joan Nyanyuki, the director for East Africa at Amnesty International, told the Times that the verdict against Nyanzi “demonstrates the depths of the government’s intolerance of criticism.”
According to the Times’ characterization, Nyanzi’s Facebook posts “contain profanity-laced vitriol about the president and his wife (whom Ms. Nyanzi describes as having a 'tiny brain' the size of a sexual organ), as well as academic studies of ‘Radical Rudeness’ and the ‘Necessity of Political Vulgarity’ -- political tactics Ugandans once used to resist British imperialism.” Her conviction was related to a Facebook post in which she said she wished Museveni had been burned up in his mother’s birth canal.
