Leading Kenyan lawyer and former attorney of the country, Martha Karua, said she had been deported from Tanzania to prevent her from participating in the court case of opposition leader Tundu Lissu.
Two colleagues who accompanied her were reportedly detained and deported after flying from neighboring Kenya. Tanzanian authorities have not commented yet.
Lissu, the leader of Tanzania's main opposition Shadema Party, will appear in court on Monday after being charged with treason last month.
Karua is a respected human rights advocate and a voice critic of what she calls East Africa’s “democracy slides backward.”
She also represents Kizza Besigye, an opposition politician in Ugandan, who was kidnapped in Kenya last year and brought back to his home country to face treason.
Like Lissu, he denied the allegations, believing they were politically motivated.
Karua served as Kenya’s Attorney General from 2005 to 2009 and was the campaign of former Prime Minister Raila Odigna in a presidential bid that failed in the election in 2022.
She formed her own opposition party, the People's Liberation Party (PLP), earlier this year.
PLP said she was “an hourly interrogation” with fellow Kenyan lawyer Gloria Kimani and human rights activist Lynn Ngugi before being deported.
Chadma Secretary General John Mnyika condemned the incident: “The solution to concealing the shame of a false treason case is not to detain a foreign lawyer, but to abandon the case altogether.”
The Tanzanian Human Rights Defenders League said it was shocked by the so-called “arbitrary arrest” because Karua was allowed to enter Tanzania to observe the lawsuit when Lissu appeared in court on April 15.
Human rights groups are increasingly concerned about the crackdown on opposition in Tanzania, ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections in October.
Lissu, the leader of the main opposition Shadema Party, was unable to seek bail because he was charged with treason, which was the maximum sentence of death.
He was assassinated in 2017 after being shot 16 times.
Opposition leaders were arrested in April after holding a rally under “no reform, no elections.”
He demanded a comprehensive change, saying that current laws in Tanzania do not allow free elections. The government denies the allegations.
Since his arrest, his Chadema party has refused to comply with the election commission's request to sign a code of conduct and has therefore been banned from participating in the October poll.
The document requires the parties and their supporters to “perform well” in the election and to “maintain peace and harmony” in the election.
Chadma regards the code of conduct as a means to curb the opposition and continues with state repression.
The CCM Party, which has ruled in Tanzania since 1977, is expected to retain power after the latest developments.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan is expected to be his presidential candidate.
She has been widely praised for giving greater political freedom when she took office in 2021 after her death in 2021.
Her critics say Tanzania has seen the repression of Magsin again. The government denies the allegations.
Other reports by Humphrey Mgonja of Nairobi
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