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Following immense pressure mounted against her office, Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Jane Frances Abodo has decided to drop the charge of “idle and disorderly” against some of the suspected anti-corruption demonstrators.

The chief government prosecutor explained she had to take an “administrative step” to have the idle and disorderly charge dropped.

“Most of our laws inherited from our colonial masters need cleaning up. If you look through the Penal Code Act, a number of laws are really archaic. And as the President said about ‘idle and disorderly,’ nobody should be charged with that because you can’t be idle in your own country,” DPP Abodo said in an interview at her office in Kampala yesterday.

She added: “…Some of these laws we don’t have to apply them mechanically; we have to look at our surroundings. What is our surrounding now and do we really need to charge people with this? Administratively, we removed idle and disorderly charges and we left the common nuisance charges.”

Late last month, more than 100 youth were arrested by police and other security agencies for marching to Parliament as they protested what they called rampant corruption in Parliament and the country at large.

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