Category: Legal-Judicial

Former Chadian president Hissene Habre was ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars to victims of human rights abuses after his conviction by a special court in 2017. But by the time he died in August, Habre’s victims had still not received a dime.

The African Union-backed court tried Chad’s ex-ruler Hissene Habre in Senegal and found him guilty of crimes he committed in the 1980s — a first for the continent.

On September 15, a team of AU lawyers arrived in Chad to meet with victims’ advocates, lawyers and government officials, to begin the process of establishing a trust fund for Habre’s victims.

Habre oversaw the killing and torture of tens of thousands of people during his rule as Chad’s president from 1982 to 1990. When he was convicted, the African Union was ordered to raise about $150 million that would be allocated to more than 7,000 of Habre’s victims.

The money was supposed to come from Habre’s assets, as well as from outside contributions. But the victims still haven’t been paid.

Their plight gained renewed attention in August when Habre died just five years into his life sentence.

Jacqueline Moudeina is the lead counsel for Habre’s victims. She says the African Union has not made much progress. They have yet to furnish their headquarters and hire an executive secretary, among many other tasks.

“There’s still a lot left to do,” she says. “They waited four years; and they don’t know how many more years they’ll have to wait.” If it were up to her, they would have done it all in one week.

One important task is raising money. Maadjitonke Trahohgra, the director general of Chad’s Ministry of Justice, says the Chadian government will contribute money toward the trust fund, but he doesn’t know how much.

He says many of the victims have already passed away, but the fund will provide relief for those who survived.

Clement Abaifouta is one of the surviving victims tortured for four years during Habre’s rule. He witnessed the deaths of many fellow prisoners and in some cases, was forced to dig their graves.

Now 63, he serves as president of the Association of Victims of the Crimes of the Hissene Habre regime, an organization advocating for victims and their families.

He says now that the African Union has come to expedite the process, victims are satisfied and they hope the process will go faster than expected.

Experts from the African Union plan to return to Chad in the coming weeks to continue setting up the trust fund.

Source: Voice of America

Rights groups in Africa have condemned the Rwandan High Court’s sentencing of Paul Rusesabagina, made famous in the Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda, to 25 years in prison. The court on Monday found Rusesabagina and 20 other suspects guilty of terrorism. Rusesabagina denies the charges, and critics say his arrest and trial did not meet international standards for justice.

Bahima Macumi fled to Kenya more than 20 years ago following Rwanda’s civil war, but has been following Rusesabagina’s trial closely.

He said Rusesabagina clearly did not get a fair trial.

He says this shows the Rwandan government does not want to be corrected, because if it did, they would have at least listened to this person who saved over 1,000 people. He says if the person who saved over 1,000 people can be called a terrorist, what would they call the one who did not save anybody?

To the world at large, Rusesabagina is a hero for sheltering at-risk Tutsis and Hutus in the Kigali hotel he managed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

To the Rwandan government, he is a threat, a fierce critic of President Paul Kagame who allegedly supported a militia group that seeks to overthrow the Rwandan government.

Human rights advocates are condemning his conviction.

According to Amnesty International, the Monday court ruling puts in question the fairness of Rwanda’s judicial system when it comes to high-profile and sensitive cases.

Sarah Jackson is Amnesty’s deputy regional director for East Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes.

“We found many fair trial violations, including his unlawful rendition to Rwanda, his imposed disappearance at the beginning of the case and his initial inability to select a lawyer of his own choosing and all of these things during the pretrial period impact the fairness of the trial itself,” Jackson said.

Rusesabagina has 30 days to appeal his conviction, but rights groups doubt that judges can make an impartial decision on the case. Human Rights Watch’s Lewis Mudge explains.

“Unfortunately, this case has become an emblematic case in Rwanda so much that it really does highlight the lack of independence in the judiciary,” Mudge said. “It’s difficult for us to say that an appeal should happen or will happen because that will imply a degree of confidence in the judicial system that is currently in Rwanda.”

Rusesabagina says he was tricked into going to Rwanda in August of 2020. He had boarded a flight in Dubai that he believed was bound for Burundi, only for the flight to land in Kigali, where he was quickly arrested.

He went on trial along with 20 others in February. U.S State Department spokesman Ned Price Monday said the reported lack of fair trial in Rusesabagina’s case calls into question the fairness of the verdict. Rwandan prosecutors maintain the trial was fair.

Source: Voice of America

Rwanda’s High Court has sentenced Paul Rusesabagina of “Hotel Rwanda” fame to 25 years in prison after finding him guilty on terrorism-related charges.

Rusesabagina, 67, has denied the charges. He has 30 days to appeal the sentence.

The court convicted and sentenced the hotelier-turned-activist Monday following a trial that critics say was unfair with a pre-determined outcome.

Rusesabagina and 20 others were charged with offenses for their alleged connections to the National Forces of Liberation, or the FLN, a militia group the government accuses of carrying out terrorist attacks in Rwanda.

In announcing the sentence, presiding Judge Antoine Muhima told a Kigali courtroom that Rusesabagina was guilty of creating and being a member of a terrorist organization.

Rwandan Government Spokeswoman Yolande Makolo said on Twitter that evidence against the defendants was “indisputable.”

A state-controlled newspaper had earlier reported that prosecutors were seeking a life sentence for Rusesabagina, a prominent critic of President Paul Kagame and his government.

Family and advocates say Rusesabagina, who left his home country in 1996 and is a Belgian citizen and a U.S. resident, was effectively tricked into returning to Rwanda in August 2020. After flying to the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, Rusesabagina boarded a private plane and was flown to Kigali, where he was arrested.

Rusesabagina said in interviews after his detention that he believed he was flying to Burundi to speak in churches at the invitation of a friend.

Kate Gibson, one of Rusesabagina’s lawyers, spoke to VOA English to Africa’s Daybreak Africa radio program from Geneva and said Rusesabagina never stood a chance in court.

“It’s our opinion that this is the end of a story that was scripted and written even before Mr. Rusesabagina was kidnapped,” she said. “But there was always a deliberate and decided plan in place that he would be put on trial and convicted by the Rwandan judicial authorities.”

Gibson said Rusesabagina did not receive a fair trial, saying lawyers weren’t allowed to bring documents to him and when documents got through for discussion, they were confiscated. The trial, she said, was “so far below internationally recognized standards for a fair trial that the verdict itself is of no particular consequence.”

Independent observers seem to agree. Representatives from the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Center for Human Rights, who have been monitoring the trial as part of the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch, echoed Gibson’s sentiment.

“This so-called trial is not a real adversarial proceeding: it has become a spectacle in which the state’s version of events is not allowed to be challenged. Any conviction that emerges from it cannot be considered credible as it will be based on evidence that has not been properly examined.” Geoffrey Robertson QC, the TrialWatch Expert said.

“It’s an empty verdict because the proceedings that went before it was so manifestly unfair,” Gibson said. Basic rights such as legal assistance, the right to adequate time and facilities to prepare and the right to be presumed innocent, were denied, she added.

“Days after Paul’s [Rusesabagina] arrest, high ranking members of the Rwandan authorities including the president [Paul Kagame] came out and said that Paul was guilty,” she said.

The United States also issued a statement of concern about the trial and doubt over the verdict, noting in particular Rusesabagina’s complaints about the lack of access to his lawyers and documents.

“We urge the Government of Rwanda to take steps to examine these shortcomings in Mr. Rusesabagina’s case and establish safeguards to prevent similar outcomes in the future,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.

Source: Voice of America

South Africa’s top court has ruled that former President Jacob Zuma had failed in his bid to have his 15-month jail sentence for failing to attend a corruption inquiry overturned.

The sentence was handed down in June after Zuma failed to testify at an inquiry probing corruption during his nine-year rule, seen as a test of post-apartheid South Africa’s ability to enforce the rule of law, particularly against powerful politicians.

In a majority decision on Friday, the Constitutional Court rejected his arguments.

“The application for rescission is dismissed,” Justice Sisi Khampepe said as she read the majority decision, which included an order for Zuma to pay costs.

It was the latest legal setback for the 79-year-old anti-apartheid veteran from the ruling African National Congress, whose presidency between 2009 and 2018 was marred by widespread allegations of corruption and malfeasance. He denies wrongdoing.

“Obviously the foundation is disappointed with this judgment,” Mzwanele Manyi, spokesman for the JG Zuma Foundation, said in response.

Zuma’s jailing on July 7, after handing himself over to police at the last minute, led to violent riots, looting, and vandalism in South Africa, killing more than 300 people and costing businesses billions of South African rand.

His successor Cyril Ramaphosa described the unrest as an orchestrated attempt to destabilize the country and pledged to crack down on alleged instigators.

The violence was also fuelled by simmering frustration among largely Black communities still living in squalid conditions long after the ANC swept to power in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.

A former senior intelligence operative with the ANC’s then banned military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe before rising to the highest office, Zuma says he is the victim of a political witchhunt and that acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo is biased.

Zondo served as chairman of the graft inquiry.

The department of correctional services placed Zuma on medical parole earlier this month after surgery following his hospitalization in August. That decision is being challenged by the opposition Democratic Alliance.

Zuma faces 16 counts of fraud, corruption, and racketeering related to the 1999 purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats, and equipment from five European arms firms when he was deputy president.

He is accused of taking bribes from one of the firms, French defense giant Thales, which has been charged with corruption and money laundering.

Source: Nam News Network (NNN)

A judge in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, has ordered the arrest of a newspaper’s managers this week after FrontPage Africa allegedly failed to respond to a summons.

The paper’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Rodney Sieh, told VOA that the summons was delivered Monday when no one was at the paper’s offices, and that it gave managers only 90 minutes’ notice that they were due to meet with a judge.

The summons relates to the investigative outlet’s coverage of former defense minister Brownie Samukai’s conviction in a corruption case. A Supreme Court last month upheld a lower court’s verdict that found Samukai guilty of embezzling millions from the pension fund of Liberia’s armed forces.

Circuit court judge Ousman Feika alleges that FrontPage Africa incorrectly reported his role in presiding over the case.

“I think (Feika’s) issue was the initial case was submitted by his predecessor. That was the only discrepancy. But we did not print any false article against the judge,” Sieh told VOA.

Liberia’s judiciary did not respond to a request for comment sent through its web portal. An email sent to the address listed on its website was returned as undeliverable.

Sieh said that the judge wanted FrontPage Africa’s managers to meet with him to explain their coverage of the trial.

Because of pandemic restrictions, the paper’s staff currently work from home. The first they heard of the summons was when they received the arrest order, Sieh said.

“The only person (in) the office was the security,” Sieh said, adding that the time the meeting was scheduled made it “nearly impossible for anyone to appear in court.”

“I think the judge was very excessive in this decision to have us arrested,” he said. The publisher added that the paper has not arranged legal representation because it has still not officially received the summons.

In a letter to its readers, FrontPage Africa pleaded with Liberia’s chief justice “to ensure that the judicial branch use its power for those who need it the most, and not to muzzle, intimidate or instill fears in members of the Fourth Estate.”

Media rights organizations criticized the court order. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said on social media it was dismayed by the order to arrest the management, and called on the judge to focus on criminals, not journalists who are exposing corruption.

Liberia has a relatively stable media freedom record. The country ranks 98 out of 180 countries, where 1 is freest on the index published by Reporters Without Borders.

The media watchdog has noted that Liberia moved to decriminalize defamation, but that some outlets, including FrontPage Africa, face legal harassment over investigative reporting.

Source: Voice of America

The terrorism case against the leader of Tanzania’s main opposition party can go ahead as planned, a high court judge in Dar es Salaam said Wednesday, dismissing objections by his party.

Chadema party chairman Freeman Mbowe and his supporters have described the charges as a politically-motivated effort to crush dissent, and accused police of torturing him in custody.

His lawyers had argued that the high court’s Corruption and Economic Crimes Division where he appeared had no powers to hear the case, which was previously being handled by a magistrate’s court.

But on Wednesday judge Elinaza Luvanda said that “this court has the jurisdiction to hear terrorism cases and therefore I don’t agree with the objection made by defendants.”

The hearing took place under tight security, with some representatives from foreign embassies and Chadema’s senior leaders in attendance, but many journalists were banned from entering the courtroom by police.

Mbowe has been behind bars since July 21 when he was arrested along with a number of other senior Chadema officials in a night-time police raid hours before they were to hold a public forum to demand constitutional reform.

The 59-year-old has been charged with terrorism financing and conspiracy in a case that has sparked concerns about democracy and the rule of law under President Samia Suluhu Hassan.

On Monday, Mbowe had appeared in court to pursue a case against top legal officials, claiming his constitutional rights had been violated during his arrest and when he was charged.

His defense team says he was held without charge for five days and then charged without his lawyer being present.

The opposition has denounced the arrests as a throwback to the oppressive rule of Tanzania’s late leader John Magufuli who died suddenly in March.

There had been hope Hassan would bring about a new era of democracy after the increasingly autocratic rule of Magufuli, nicknamed the “Bulldozer” for his uncompromising style.

But Chadema leaders say the arrests reflect a deepening slide into “dictatorship.”

Prosecutors say the allegations against Mbowe do not relate to the constitutional reform conference Chadema had planned to hold in the port city of Mwanza in July, but to alleged offences last year in another part of Tanzania.

Chadema has said prosecutors accuse Mbowe of conspiring to attack a public official, and of giving 600,000 Tanzanian shillings ($260/220 euros) towards blowing up petrol stations and public gatherings and cutting down trees to block roads.

Source: Voice of America