South Sudanese Authorities Deny Accusations Of Rights Violations Claimed By Human Rights Watch

South Sudan denied on Friday a report that said the National Security Service (NSS) engages in arbitrarily arrests and torture, and operates with near-total impunity, without meaningful judicial or legislative oversight.

"The allegations are inaccurate and unedifying stance, operational principles, standards, best practices and the core values as well as ethical conduct and execution of the service's mandate in accordance with the Constitution and the law," spokesman for the Internal Bureau of National Security Service, David John Kumuri, told Anadolu Agency after Human Rights Watch issued the report Thursday.

He said the allegations are false and baseless said the NSS is an agency that operates within the laws and Constitution of South Sudan.

"The NSS is among the disciplined law enforcement agencies in the country and indeed in the region that actively continues to undertake signification improvement of training its personnel on human rights laws and fundamental freedoms," said Kumuri.

He said statements by Human Right Watch are unjustifiable and vilifying in nature.

"The NSS upholds its moral compass and believes in those timeless ideals, including by affirming that the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. In this respect, the service holds all of its members accountable … according to the country's penal code and other relevant laws."

"The accusations negatively depicted upon the National Security Service … are believed to serve as avenues of generating funds from international donors to further aid their individual and personal goals. As the old saying goes: 'The end justifies the means" and as well is intended to reduce trust or virally infect the trust ever existing between the South Sudanese citizens and their government" he said.

The rights watchdog said authorities have continued to infringe on freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly, arresting and detaining critics, human rights defenders and journalists.

The report released by the South Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, Nyagoah Tut Pur, claimed that the NNS has broad powers to arrest, detain and surveil.

"Since 2013, the agency has abducted, tortured, and forcibly disappeared hundreds of people on the basis of their ethnic affiliations or in reprisals for their opinions with the clear aim of crushing criticism of those in power," according to the report.

It added that since a peace agreement was signed, the agency has on numerous occasions harassed journalists, shut down media outlets, restricted the media's ability to print or publish stories deemed critical of the government and unlawfully held people in poor conditions leading to deaths in custody.

In March 2022, former Eye Radio editor Woja Emmanuel Wani was kidnapped in the national capital of Juba, tortured and poisoned before he escaped.

"I was put at gunpoint and forced into the car," said Wani. "They drove me to an unknown location where they questioned me on issues related to politics and then drugged me."

Wani still does not know the identities of his abductors.

Threats also include arrests and detention by state security. -