The controversy around Executive Order RNB No. 6 of 2025 is often presented as a fight between neutrality and activism.
That is too simple. Counsel Elison Karuhanga and Senior Counsel Isaac Ssemakadde are arguing from two different, legitimate frames. Elison advances a doctrinal public law critique: what may the Uganda Law Society lawfully do as a statutory body speaking in the name of a compulsory membership?
Ssemakadde advances a functional case: what should the bar do when it believes the rule of law environment has deteriorated so far that engagement with government and even reliance on ordinary court centred correction will not change outcomes?
The Executive Order sets out a narrative of institutional breakdown and alleged abuses, and it frames the moment as one requiring a decisive response in defence of constitutionalism and the independence of the bar and bench. It then goes further.
It declares a departure from the tradition of political neutrality and contains operative provisions that unequivocally endorse named candidates and party slates for the 2026 elections, coupled with a call to mobilise in support of those endorsed candidates.
Whatever one thinks of the political merits, that structure explains why the Order attracts both a legal attack and a functional defence. It mixes rule of law advocacy with electoral alignment.
On doctrine, Elison has the clearer ground. A statutory corporation does not enjoy the free range of a private citizen. Its powers are bounded by its enabling objects and what is genuinely incidental to them.
The Uganda Law Society also speaks in a corporate voice that carries special weight because membership is not merely voluntary in practice. When such a body moves from defending the rule of law in general terms to endorsing particular candidates and instructing mobilisation for them, it risks crossing into a purpose and activity that are difficult to justify as part of a professional association’s lawful remit.
In public law language, it invites an ultra vires and improper purpose critique. Elison’s doctrinal objection also has a legitimacy dimension that is not technical. The Bar’s credibility depends on its ability to protect lawyers across political divides, to engage any government in office, and to maintain authority when it criticises illegality.
A Society that becomes visibly partisan risks being treated as a faction. That has downstream costs. Courts may regard its interventions with suspicion. Government may feel licensed to dismiss its statements as opposition politics. Dissenting members may feel politically branded by an institution that speaks in their name.
These are precisely the kinds of institutional consequences doctrine tries to prevent. Elison is, therefore, not simply saying the bar should be quiet. He is saying the bar should not become an electoral actor.
Ssemakadde’s argument, however, is not best understood as a rejection of legality. It is a claim about how legality functions in hard conditions. The Executive Order’s premise is that the ordinary playbook is no longer working.
If the Society believes that engagement with government is performative and that courts are unable, unwilling, or too constrained to provide effective correction, then the usual strategy of statements, meetings, and incremental litigation looks like managing decline rather than reversing it.
On that diagnosis, neutrality is not a principle but a tactic, and a tactic can fail. Ssemakadde’s functional claim is that the bar must seek leverage where leverage exists, and elections are a moment when leverage can be exerted through public alignment with actors perceived to be committed to restoring constitutional order rule of law and protecting the profession independence of the legal profession.
That functional argument has force because public law is not enforced by doctrine alone. It is enforced by institutions and power. If the institutions of enforcement are compromised, the best doctrinal argument may deliver little or nothing.
It is, therefore, rational, as a matter of political strategy, to ask whether the bar should reposition itself to influence outcomes rather than merely comment on them. In that sense, Ssemakadde has a point about objectives and realities.
A Bar that behaves as though the system is self-correcting may end up defending a theory of law while losing the lived conditions that make law meaningful. But each position strains if taken to its extreme.
Doctrinal purity can become sterile if it is read as requiring disengagement from the political environment in which the administration of justice is contested. Functional urgency can become reckless if it treats legal limits as optional whenever leaders believe the situation is dire.
A statutory body does not acquire new powers because its leadership believes engagement is futile. Indeed, the moments of greatest conviction are often the moments when the discipline of legality matters most.
That is why, therefore, both Counsel Elison and Senior Counsel Ssemakadde have a point. Elison is right that institutional endorsement and mobilisation language in the Executive Order expose the Society to doctrinal challenge and erode the Bar’s legitimacy as a body for the whole profession.
Ssemakadde is right that, if conventional engagement and court centred correction are truly ineffective, the Bar must rethink how it discharge its public purpose duty in real time. The task is to marry objective to doctrine: to pursue rule of law ends anchored in reality through methods that preserve the Society’s independence, credibility, and legal defensibility.
The writer is a member, Uganda Law Society
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