Following their success at the Jessup Moot Competition – National Rounds in March this year, a team of Makerere University students who were slated to represent Uganda at the International stage in Washington DC (US) will unfortunately miss out after their visa applications were delayed.
The international competition starts today, 8th April.
The Philip C. Jessup moot court competition is the world’s biggest with participants from roughly 700 law schools in 100 countries competing for the ultimate prize.
A Makerere fourth-year Law Student who is also one of the participants in the team, Mr Sabiti Edwin told Campus Bee how their efforts to get visas were frustrated after numerous attempts.
He narrated the ordeal as follows;
“We qualified on 4th march to represent Uganda in Jessup Moot Competition, the biggest in the world. If you search about it, it has about 700 students taking part from about 100 countries. That means it is literally the dream of any law student (comes with networking, scholarships, exposure).
But because there many teams that are going to take part, they hold national rounds of the competition, whereby Uganda could only send one team. So we had to first qualify as the ones who had to represent Uganda in the competition. This means that we couldn’t start VISA applications before we qualified to represent the country.
So we started applying for VISAs immediately after emerging winners on national stage( in March). But to our detriment, we first faced challenges with the VISA application system such as payment errors, so when it finally accepted our payments, they gave us appointment letters for November and December. We are a team of five.
The competition starts 8th April. On the US system we tried an option for urgent need to travel which allows one to apply for expedition, we tried sending several emails.
Finally they responded with rejection of all the team’s applications. We tried all ways including numerous phone calls, but still our applications were rejected. So we contacted the hosts of this competition in the US, but there’s nothing much they could do to help us.
We then proceeded to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which gave us a note verbal which would have supported our applications on VISA, but still, they were rejected. Regardless of all the support we had managed to gather for the trip and time of stay in the US, our dream has been watered down.”
This team is comprised of Sabiti Edwin, Amos Mumbere, Kevin Nakimbugwe and Victor Taremwa
The painful revelation came to the team after preparing for over 7 months to give their best at the International stage.
It should be recalled that from this team, a duo of Nakimbugwe and Sabiti represented Uganda in the recently held All Africa Human Rights Moot Court competition in Egypt, in which they emerged the best.
The competition stands as one of the biggest on the continent and this only means; Africa’s finest have faced a setback from participating in the biggest Global Law Competition.
