The Power of the DPP to Direct the Police to Investigate

Abstract

Article 120(3)(a) of the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda authorises the Director of Public Prosecutions to direct the police to investigate any information of a criminal nature and to report expeditiously. The provision is often treated in practice as a power that becomes useful only after a police file has reached a prosecutor. That understanding reverses the constitutional sequence. The power is addressed to information, not to a completed file; its commanded activity is investigation; and the file or report is the product expected to return to the DPP. The power may therefore be exercised before police registration and may require an investigation to be opened. That conclusion does not turn the DPP into the operational commander of the police. The Constitution preserves police responsibility for investigative methods and command, while legislation reserves particular coercive measures to police officers or judicial officers. The proper account is consequently neither prosecutorial passivity nor prosecutorial takeover. It is a bounded power to determine whether criminal information will be investigated, to frame the lawful and evidential questions that require inquiry, to insist upon reasonable inculpatory and exculpatory lines, and to demand an expeditious, reasoned report. This article develops that account through the breadth, length, width, height, depth, vertical axis, horizontal axis and circular diameter of Article 120(3)(a). It subjects the leading Ugandan and Kenyan authorities to close analysis, and tests Uganda’s settlement against South Africa, England and Wales, Scotland, Canada and European human-rights doctrine. The comparison shows that early prosecutorial engagement can protect the quality and independence of charging decisions, but can also produce joint tunnel vision, political manipulation and blurred responsibility unless direction is written, reviewable and separated from coercive tactics. The available ODPP data reveal considerable prosecution-guided activity, but do not show when directions begin, whether police comply, whether exculpatory lines are pursued, or whether intervention improves the quality of justice. The institutional failure is therefore best understood as under-assertion combined with under-institutionalisation. The article proposes a focused enabling statute, a joint DPP–IGP protocol, a pre-file intake mechanism, fresh-eyes charge review, rights-sensitive templates, staged escalation and outcome-based public reporting. It also identifies practices that must be abandoned, especially the file-receipt culture, informal unrecorded instructions, numerical performance measures detached from justice, and directions that presuppose guilt