Torture was used to extract confessions from these presumed murderers and terrorists. Ironically, the presumed wrongdoers became victims of terror and prey to the evil gratification and amusement of the torturers, who became bullies and sadists.

And for those wrongs, the taxpayers have to fork out Shs 80 million for each of the 22 victims. In the domestic and international laws, and by necessary implication of police standards, there is an absolute legal prohibition of torture.

It is laid down in the Constitution, Prevention and Prohibition of Torture Act, treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Uganda is a signatory.

In all these legal instruments and conventions, the ban on torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is absolute, even in times of war.

Along with genocide, torture is the only crime that every state must punish, no matter who commits it or where.

The Prevention and Prohibition of Torture Act 2012 prescribes 15 years in prison as punishment for the convicted offender. 

The High court should not have stopped at ordering government to compensate the victims, but it should have directed the police to interest the directorate of public prosecutions (DPP) in the matter.

Their superiors know the officers who tortured the victims. And the culprits cannot claim they carried out torture acts in the name of protecting Ugandans or they were obeying lawful orders from their superiors.

Ugandans cannot approve of an act of torture. The culprits knew what they were doing was a crime, but they did it, anyway, with impunity and with the false hope that it would be legitimized by extraction of information.

They must be held individually liable for these crimes. It appears the security officers involved work themselves into a temper, yield to savage instincts and arrogate themselves the duty of trying the suspects, convicting them and ultimately meting out a punishment of torture.

It is not too late to fish out the culprits. If the DPP is not interested, the Anti-torture Act empowers any private person to institute criminal proceedings against the culprits.

The police and other state agencies are enjoined by the Constitution to help a private prosecutor to accomplish his mission of having the culprits tried and punished.

We need to fight impunity as well as discourage officers in public offices from abusing the people’s trust. It is not fair for the taxpayer to pay for the crimes of these officers.

There is also need for the officers to understand that they would be held individually liable for their crimes. And they don’t need to obey unlawful orders from their superiors. The supervisors of these culprits are equally culpable.

The culprits need to feel and appreciate that torture is not only unlawful and immoral, but also its perpetrators must pay the price as prescribed by law.

But then there is one question: if we all know that torture is absolutely prohibited, why does it endure, especially with Ugandan security agencies?

It appears these people are not motivated by the desire to get to the truth and extracting a confession with a view of combating crime, but by something fouler, such as an urge to inflict pain, exact revenge, or even just for sadistic fun.

That seems to have been part of the motivation of the security officers who torture people in Nalufenya and other ungazetted detention centres.

Police has never explained why they ill-treat those they arrest when they push them under police pickup truck seats. At times we have seen armed men disrespect women when they aggressively fondle their breasts in full glare of cameras.

One only wonders what happens in places where there are no cameras. It is also a puzzle.

During the recruitment exercise for these security agencies, be it police, the army, prisons, or intelligence, they are required to present certificates of good character from local authorities and these recommendation are taken on the face value.

It now appears people who write these recommendations don’t actually know these people’s character, for if they did, they would never have recommended torturers into the force.

I am also confident that in the training manual of security agencies, torture does not feature. Our security organs need to keep civil at all times.

Those who veer off the civilized course must take their savage instincts elsewhere, not in the armed forces.

 The author is the business development director at The Observer Media Limited.