Kenya: Vrede over planer om at flytte retssag til tandløs domstol

Forfatter billede

Meget af den blodige vold efter parlamentsvalget i 2007 menes planlagt og styret af magtfulde politikere – fire af dem skulle for en international domstol, men sådan behøver det slet ikke gå.

NAIROBI, 2 May 2012 (IRIN): Human rights groups in Kenya have warned of a potential miscarriage of justice (justitsmord mod voldsofrene ) after the government moved to have the cases of four people charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) transferred to a region tribunal which has no experience in handling such crimes.

Two of the suspects, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and former higher education minister William Ruto, are likely candidates in a forthcoming presidential election.

Together with former civil service chief Francis Muthaura and radio journalist Joshua Sang, they have been charged in connection with the widespread violence that claimed 1.300 lives and displaced some 600.000 people in the wake of the last presidential election in 2007.

The cases are being handled by the ICC because Kenya has failed to establish competent domestic judicial mechanisms.

“De vil bare beskytte de anklagede”

“Post-election violence victims must receive substantive justice, but the current attempts to move these cases from the ICC is all meant to protect the four suspects at the expense of the victims,” Lawrence Mute, a commissioner with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, told IRIN.

On 26 April, 2012, the East African Legislative Assembly, during its fifth session held in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, endorsed a motion urging the ICC to transfer the cases to the East Africa Court of Justice (EACJ).

The tenth extraordinary session of the East Africa Community Summit, held on 28 April, 2012 in Arusha, Tanzania, resolved (besluttede) to extend the mandate of the EACJ to include crimes against humanity. The court’s mandate to date was to interpret the EAC protocol.

“Setting up the mechanisms, even if the mandate of the court is extended, will take years to conclude and will delay the cases,” Mute said.

The EACJ “has never handled cases of the magnitude of the ones facing the four individual Kenyans at the ICC. I do not think the ICC will be persuaded to move these cases there,” Judith Musembi, a lecturer of international law at the University of Nairobi, told IRIN.

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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95400/KENYA-Rights-groups-oppose-move-to-sideline-ICC

Begynd fra “Activists have also called for thousands of other crimes….”