Race, Culture, and Identity
Implementing Legal Accountability to Reduce Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in Uganda
Accountability is a vital human rights principle to address preventable
maternal morbidity and mortality in Uganda. The continuous use of
‘accountability’ as a term without elaborating on it gets in the way of
using its underlying principles to improve laws and policies. The
implementation of legal accountability requires creating avenues through
which women whose maternal health rights have been violated may
access legal remedies. The existence of adequate legal remedies is vital not
only for redressing violations of rights but also for identifying and
proposing strategies towards addressing the bottlenecks in health
systems. Courts of law are principal judicial mechanisms and, therefore, it
is incumbent upon courts to expand rather than limit maternal healthrelated
rights. The Uganda Human Rights Commission is another body
which is empowered with a protective and promotional mandate that
should be used to promote and protect reproductive health rights. It is
further emphasised that accountability is not a tool to be understood and
interpreted only by legal practitioners. Rather, various forms of
accountability, including social and administrative forms, are vital for
complementing legal accountability in reducing preventable maternal
mortality and morbidity.
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