However, the parts of the Constitution relating to, inter alia; the courts, the civil service, the armed forces and the National Assembly were preserved for continuity of the basic functioning of the state.
Under the new Constitution, all executive authority was vested in the President, in this case Apollo Milton Obote, to be exercised with the advice and consent of cabinet.
Former President, Sir Edward Mutesa was consequently evicted from the State House and eventually forced to flee into exile.
The Applicant in this case, Michael Matovu, also the Saza Chief of Buddu in Buganda Kingdom, was arrested on May 22, 1966, and detained at Masindi Prison under the provisions of the Deportation Ordinance.
On September 6, 1966, Michael Matovu filed, through his advocate, what purported to be an application for the prerogative writ of habeas corpus under Section 349 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Uganda.
However, his application involved the need to answer various questions requiring constitutional interpretation and so the presiding judge, Jeffreys Jones, J, referred the matter to a 3-member bench of the Court (Udo Udoma, CJ; Sheridan and Jeffreys Jones, JJ) for hearing and determination of the Constitutional questions (not the application for the writ of habeas corpus per se).
No doubt, the roots of this 1966 Constitution lay in an extra-constitutional act to wit, a coup d'état or revolution perpetrated by Apollo Milton Obote when he seized all powers of government.
In the first instance, the Court overlooked what would ordinarily be grave errors in the original application by Michael Matovu such as failure to file a notice of motion, name a proper respondent and reliance on defective affidavits.
The Attorney General submitted that under International Law, an independent and sovereign nation may have its government or Constitution changed by way of a coup d’état, where an abrupt political change destroys a pre-existing legal order and effectively replaces it in a manner that pre-existing legal order did not itself contemplate.
It was thus argued that the suspension of the 1962 Constitution and seizure of all powers of government by Apollo Milton Obote in February 1962 was in fact a coup d’état.
Further reliance was sought on the Pakistani Supreme Court decision in the Dosso case where the Kelsen theory was applied in a similar circumstance.
[3] ″No jurist would maintain that even after a successful revolution the old constitution and the laws based thereupon remain in force, on the ground that they have not been nullified in a manner anticipated by the old order itself.
Only its government changes, albeit through what domestically in that state, is an “illegal” means when you consider the deposed legal order's stipulations as to what is permissible as a mode of assuming power.
Hence, according to international law, victorious revolutions or successful coups d’etat are to be interpreted as procedures by which a national legal order can be changed.
Importantly, even the fundamental human rights that had been enshrined within Pakistan's 1956 Constitution were deemed to also have been excluded from the new legal order.
″We would like to emphasize, however, that the question of the recognition of the new Head of State of Uganda by foreign nations is not strictly within the scope of this enquiry.
1 of 1997, wherein it was extensively applied by Justice George Wilson Kanyeihamba to distance the Court from the affairs of the army and the Executive authority over it, save in a few select, necessary cases; and IPPR v the Attorney General, Miscellaneous Application No.592 of 2014, in which the Applicant sought an injunction to bar the Ugandan government from enabling or sponsoring the exportation of qualified Ugandan medical doctors and nurses to Trinidad and Tobago.