Ugandan human rights activist and law student Praise Aloikin Opoloje has disappeared after being summoned to a police station in Kampala and handed over to armed operatives from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence. According to Agora Discourse, a civil society network she works with, Aloikin Opoloje was called to Namungoona Police Station, only for officers there to release her into the custody of CMI personnel, who drove her away in an unmarked vehicle bearing the registration UA875AC. Her whereabouts remain unknown.
The vehicle described in the group’s account matches what Ugandans have grimly nicknamed a “drone” — an unregistered or falsely plated van used by state security operatives to snatch government critics off the streets. Uganda’s rights community has an equally weary name for what typically follows: a trip to CMI’s “dungeons”, the informal term for the military intelligence agency’s detention cells at its Mbuya headquarters in Kampala, where detainees have for years reported incommunicado confinement and torture.
At 26, Aloikin Opoloje may be among the youngest public figures to be pulled into this system in recent memory — a distinction that has sharpened the alarm around her case, given the documented severity of what previous detainees say happens inside. A coalition of Ugandan lawyers and activists has demanded her immediate release, saying no offence had been disclosed against her and that neither her family nor her legal representatives have been told where she is being held.
Opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, popularly known as Bobi Wine, has denounced the episode as an act of state criminality and demanded her unconditional release, while activists have organised online under the hashtag #FreePraiseAloikin. Neither the Uganda Police Force nor the country’s defence authorities have issued an official statement on Aloikin Opoloje’s legal status, detention site, or any charges against her.
Her family and legal team maintain that her continued, unacknowledged detention violates constitutional requirements that detainees be held in authorised facilities and produced before a court within 48 hours. A well-worn playbook in Uganda suggests that this 48-hour window is unlikely to be honoured, and Aloikin Opoloje’s ordeal is unlikely to end quickly or quietly.
Aloikin Opoloje is one of Uganda’s most prominent young human rights defenders, born in 1999 in the Paliisa district of eastern Uganda. She has said her activism was shaped by growing up amid the visible failures of the country’s health and education systems under entrenched state corruption. In 2025, the European Union honoured her with its Human Rights Defenders’ Award, and she was later named runner-up for the Martin Ennals Award, one of the world’s most prestigious human rights prizes.
Key points
- The EU human-rights laureate may be the youngest Ugandan yet to disappear into the state’s "dungeon" system.
- Lawyers and opposition figures are demanding to know where she is - and bracing for what usually comes next.
- Her disappearance comes amid a broader tightening of Uganda’s political space following a general election in which President Yoweri Museveni was declared winner with 71.65 percent of the vote.
