Category: Judicial

A local jihadist leader and 18 fighters were killed during a military strike on their base in Mozambique’s insurgency-hit north, a bloc of southern African nations said Saturday.

Al-Qaida-linked jihadists have been terrorizing Mozambique’s gas-rich Cabo Delgado region since 2017, raiding villages and towns in a bid to establish a caliphate.

Local jihadist leader Rajab Awadhi Ndanjile was killed along with 18 other fighters in an offensive on September 25 on the militants’ base in the Nangade district of Cabo Delgado, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional grouping said.

Many members of the 16-nation bloc have deployed troops in Mozambique to fight the insurgents.

SADC said Ndanjile recruited and indoctrinated fighters and was involved in the first attack in the region and “subsequent attacks on villages” as well as the “abduction of women and children.”

In July, Rwanda sent 1,000 troops to Mozambique, the first country to do so. Several other SADC members followed suit.

South Africa has deployed nearly 1,500 soldiers in the neighboring country.

The insurgency has killed more than 3,300 people — half of them civilians — and displaced at least 800,000 from their homes over the past four years.

Source: Voice of America

A World Health Organization investigation has found that dozens of women were allegedly sexually abused and exploited by international staff and locals hired to respond to an Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The WHO appointed a five-member independent commission in October 2020 to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by its staff in Congo’s Ituri and North and South Kivu provinces.

Senior WHO officials call the results, released Tuesday, horrifying and heartbreaking.

The commission found that more than 80 alleged cases of sexual abuse occurred during the outbreak between August 2018 and June 2020. Most of the victims were uneducated women ages 13 to 43.

Commission member Malick Coulibaly said most of the women who testified said they had been forced to exchange sex for the promise of a job. He said some of the sexual exploitation and abuse was organized through a network operating through the local branch that recruited people to work on the Ebola response.

“Most victims did not get the jobs that they were promised in spite of the fact that they agreed to sexual relations,” Coulibaly said through an interpreter. “Some women declared that they continued to be sexually harassed by men and they were obliged to have sexual relations to be able to keep their job or even to be paid.”

Coulibaly added that some women had been dismissed for having refused sexual relations. The panel reports nine women were raped.

Women who were interviewed said none of the perpetrators had used birth control, and some who became pregnant said the men who had abused them forced them to have abortions.

The investigation found 21 of the 83 alleged perpetrators were WHO staff, some Congolese, some from abroad. The other alleged perpetrators were contractors such as drivers and security personnel.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the document as harrowing reading.

“The conduct it describes is a sickening betrayal of the people we serve,” he said. “It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account. … And I will take personal responsibility for making whatever changes we need to make to prevent this happening in future.”

Tedros said four WHO staff have been fired and two have been put on administrative leave. He said the alleged perpetrators of rape will be referred to national authorities in Congo for investigation.

The WHO chief also said that all victims of sexual exploitation and abuse will have access to the services they need, including medical and psychosocial support, and that assistance for their children’s education will be provided.

Source: Voice of America

A South African court Monday began hearing an appeal launched by former President Jacob Zuma on his lengthy prison sentence in the wake of violent protests against his imprisonment.

According to Reuters, Zuma’s lawyers asked the court to release the 79-year-old Zuma partly on the grounds that the Constitutional Court improperly imposed the sentence in his absence.

Zuma reported to a prison facility in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal last week to begin serving a 15-month sentence on contempt of court charges after he failed to testify before a special inquiry looking into wide-ranging allegations of official corruption during his nine years in office, which ended in 2018.

His lawyers are also arguing that he will be at risk of catching COVID-19 while imprisoned.

Zuma has denied the allegation and refused to participate in the inquiry that began during his final weeks in office.

Protests spread from KwaZulu-Natal into the country’s main economic hub of Johannesburg Sunday, with several shops looted and a section of the major M2 highway closed as some protests turned violent. Reuters says television footage showed a mall ablaze in Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal.

Police say 62 people have been arrested in connection with riots since Zuma was imprisoned.

The body of a 40-year-old man has been recovered from one of the shops that was set on fire over the weekend, according to police.

President Cyril Ramaphosa called for calm Sunday, urging protesters to demonstrate peacefully.

“People have been intimidated and threatened, and some have even been hurt,” Ramaphosa said.

Zuma, a prominent anti-apartheid fighter, remains popular despite the allegations of corruption.

Source: Voice of America

Gambia’s truth commission has wrapped up more than two years of public hearings into alleged human rights violations committed during the 22-year rule of former dictator Yahya Jammeh.

A steady parade of witnesses concluded their testimony Friday, delivering accounts of arbitrary arrests, torture, corruption and summary executions, in some cases with the victims’ bodies fed to crocodiles.

Jammeh took power in a 1994 military coup, controlling the tiny West African nation until losing the presidency to Adama Barrow in a December 2016 election. Jammeh, now 56, fled with his wife into exile in Equatorial Guinea.

Barrow’s government set up the independent Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission, which began the hearings in January 2019 and heard from 392 witnesses. The commission is expected to submit a report to the president in July. Barrow then will have six months to implement the commission’s recommendations.

“The testimonies heard during the 871 days of public hearings brought pain and bewilderment,” said Lamin Sise, the commission’s chairman.

Arbitrary arrests, unlawful detention and killings, torture, enforced disappearances and sexual violence allegedly committed by Jammeh and accomplices “achieved the desired effect of instilling fear among the Gambian population,” Sise said. “It also gave them time and space to pillage the country’s resources.”

Commissioners visited a crocodile pond that Jammeh ran in his native village of Kanila. They were presented with evidence that the animals were fed people, including babies, who were killed for ritual purposes.

The commission also investigated abuses including the 2005 slaughter of roughly 50 African migrants. Lead counsel Essa Faal said that, based on testimony and other evidence, he calculated that 214 people died at the hands of Jammeh and his accomplices.

Soldiers accused of coup attempts under Jammeh’s rule were summarily executed, student protesters were massacred, and journalists were killed or exiled, said those offering testimony, which included some perpetrators.

Human Rights Watch noted, in a May 24 report, that three of Jammeh’s alleged accomplices “already have been detained and are facing trial abroad under the legal principle of universal jurisdiction.”

It said Michael Sang Correa faces trial in the United States and Bai L. in Germany, where suspects’ full names are not disclosed because of privacy rules. Both were members of Jammeh’s elite guard, called the “junglers.” Ousman Sonko, the former interior minister, faces trial in Switzerland.

The truth commission cannot convict, but it could recommend criminal charges against Jammeh and others, according to Agence France-Presse. The commission is expected to recommend steps for accountability, with proposals focusing “on the possibility of a “hybrid” court with Gambian and international staff operating within the Gambian judicial system,” Human Rights Watch said.

Faal said if Jammeh is not prosecuted in Gambia, he could be held to account elsewhere, including in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Source: Voice of America