Human rights defenders and civil society organisations operating in East Africa are turning to legal recourse as they continue to push back against increasing government harassment and intimidation tactics targeting them, including deportation and expulsion.
Several organisations recently obtained conservatory orders from a Kenyan court in favour of a Zimbabwean constitutional lawyer who was turned away at the airport in Nairobi earlier this year
In a case update posted on X on June 14, 2026, PALU said the High Court of Kenya had granted conservatory orders in favour of Brian Bright Tamuka Kagoro, the Zimbabwean constitutional lawyer who was detained and deported from Nairobi in February 2026.
The organisation explained that the interim orders protect Kagoro against any future arbitrary denial of entry into Kenya while the court continues to adjudicate the case before it.
“This development underscores the importance of judicial oversight, accountability, and the protection of fundamental rights across Africa,” PALU said.
According to PALU, the orders would hold “pending the hearing and determination of a constitutional petition challenging his detention and deportation from Kenya”.
Conservatory orders are meant to preserve the subject matter of a petition while the constitutional questions are argued; they are not a final pronouncement that the state acted unlawfully. In Kagoro’s case, the substantive petition, focused on due process, freedom of movement and the executive’s power to expel someone without explanation, remains pending.
The petition was filed by PALU, the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), the East Africa Law Society, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), the Open Society Foundations (OSF), and Katiba Institute.
According to PALU, the petition “raises important constitutional and human rights questions relating to due process, freedom of movement, and the rule of law”.
According to public reporting and statements by rights groups, Kagoro was detained on his arrival at the airport. He was later declared persona non grata and put on a flight to South Africa. Kenyan officials accused him of financing protest activity.
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A statement by PALU at the time rejected the government’s framing of the matter.
“We are particularly alarmed by allegations circulated in sections of the media, attributed to unnamed security sources, accusing Mr Kagoro of involvement in foreign-funded mobilisation efforts to incite political unrest,” PALU’s Chief Executive Donald Deya said. “These are grave claims that carry significant reputational consequences, yet no evidence has been publicly produced to substantiate them, and no formal charges have been presented before a court of law.”
Kenya’s Interior and Foreign Affairs ministries did not engage with the substance of the accusation. The ministries never actually addressed the specific claim being disputed, that Kagoro was financing/mobilising protest activity. When Journalists For Justice (JFJ) put questions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via email, it received no response.
PALU’s is one of several cases that individuals and civil society groups in East Africa have filed in recent months as they continue to face increasingly hostile governments in the region.
Former Kenyan Justice minister, presidential candidate, and opposition leader Martha Karua has sued Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) Muhoozi Kainerugaba, and the Attorney General over her recent deportation from that country.
In her affidavit before the High Court in Uganda, Karua said she was denied entry into the country on June 22, 2026, when she arrived to represent her clients, veteran opposition politician Kizza Besigye and his co-accused, Hajj Obeid Lutale Kamulegeya, during a session in their treason case. The two are co-complainants in the case against General Muhoozi.
Persona non grata
She said she was separated from her team and detained at the airport, and that her cellphones were confiscated.
Karua claimed that she was later informed that she was not allowed into the country because of security concerns and was served a removal notice after being classified as a prohibited immigrant and described as persona non grata under Ugandan law.
In their application, Dr Besigye and Lutale are seeking a declaration that their constitutional rights were violated by the deportation of their lead lawyer. They want the court to restrain General Muhoozi and the government from preventing her entry into Uganda as their legal representative.
In July 2025, Ugandan lawyer, human rights defender and freelance journalist Agather Atuhaire and Kenyan photojournalist, politician, and activist Boniface Mwangi were joined by seven civil society organisations and regional bar associations in filing a case at the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) challenging what they termed as grave human rights violations, including acts of enforced disappearance, torture, arbitrary detention and unlawful deportation of Atuhaire and Mwangi by the Tanzanian government.
The case was prompted by the May 2025 abduction of Atuhaire and Mwangi from their hotel in Dar es Salaam. When they were finally released after days of media reports of their enforced disappearance, they claimed that they were taken to an unknown location, tortured, and sexually assaulted. They were eventually dumped near the border in Uganda and Kenya, respectively. The two had gone to Tanzania to observe the treason trial of veteran human rights lawyer and opposition leader Tundu Lissu.
Also enjoined in the case as respondents are the governments of Kenya and Uganda, as well as the East African Community (EAC). The two governments are accused of failing in their legal duty to safeguard their nationals “and exhaust all diplomatic and consular avenues to secure their safe return home”. The EAC is accused of failing to take any corrective action despite having knowledge of their plight.
The remedies the complainants are demanding include public apologies from the governments of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya; US$1 million compensation for each victim; institutional and legal reforms to prevent recurrence; and the convening of an EAC summit to review peace, security, and governance in the region.
In July 2025, Martin Mavenjina, a senior legal adviser and transitional justice expert at the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), was detained when he landed at JKIA after an official trip to South Africa. Five unidentified men believed to be intelligence officers escorted him to a Kenya Airways counter and issued him with a one-way ticket to Kampala. No deportation order was produced.
KHRC has stated that the expulsion “violates both national and international laws”.
Mavenjina remains barred from returning to Kenya, with no indication from the government that the decision will be reversed. His employer has challenged the deportation publicly, written formally to the Kenyan immigration authorities, threatened litigation, and taken the case to regional rights advocacy groups, which continue to press for Mavenjina’s safe and unconditional return to his working station in Nairobi.
In May 2025, former Kenyan Chief Justice Willy Mutunga and lawyer and politician Martha Karua were stopped at a Tanzanian airport while attempting to observe the treason trial of opposition figure Tundu Lissu, and were turned away without any explanation.
“At immigration, I was told I could not enter Tanzania. No legal reason was given. The officer said the order came from ‘above’. Eventually, my passport was stamped ‘Entry Refused’ and I was deported back to Nairobi,” said Karua.
In July 2025, Kenyan activist Mwabili Mwagodi was kidnapped in Dar es Salaam and resurfaced battered in Kwale county after, witnesses said, Tanzanian police declined to file a missing-person report.
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Across the border in Uganda, Kenyan activists Bob Njagi and Nicholas Oyoo were detained for 38 days after travelling to show solidarity with opposition figure Bobi Wine. President Yoweri Museveni eventually confirmed the detention publicly, describing the pair as “experts in riots” who had been put “in the fridge for some days”. Njagi, after his release, put it differently: “Thirty-eight days of abduction were not easy. We didn’t think that we were going to come out alive because we were being abducted by the military.”
Victor Nyamori, who works on such cases for Amnesty International Kenya, has summed up what the organisation believes is happening structurally rather than incidentally: “Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are no longer restricting repression within their own borders. Security agencies are collaborating to silence and terrorise dissent across the region.”
Beyond East Africa
The attacks against civil society organisations and human rights defenders go beyond the borders of East Africa and have spread to the rest of the continent.
In April 2026, Burkina Faso’s military government dissolved 118 civil society organisations in a single announcement, citing a 2025 association law; the UN’s most senior representative in the country had already been expelled in 2025. Human Rights Watch’s most recent World Report similarly catalogued the use of prolonged pre-trial detention, travel bans and “case recycling” against journalists and rights defenders in Egypt through 2025.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights flagged the wider trend in a resolution earlier in 2026, expressing concern about “the shrinking of civic space” and what it termed “transnational repression” ahead of a wave of presidential elections across the continent.
CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks civic freedoms globally, downgraded Kenya’s rating to “repressed” during 2025, a category it now applies, in some form, to the large majority of sub-Saharan African states it monitors.
