Chad and Senegal: A pan-African trial, at last

A fallen African dictator is likely to face a new kind of African justice

ONE of Africa’s most bloodstained former leaders, Hissène Habré, is likely to be formally charged in the next few days by a special African court with having committed a string of atrocities when he was president of Chad from 1982-1990. The judges of the so-called Extraordinary African Chambers, set up in 2012 in Senegal, will decide what charges he must face.

Mr Habré, now aged 72, has been living in Senegal since fleeing from Chad at the end of his reign. He is alleged to have committed crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture. Around 40,000 people are reckoned to have been killed and many more tortured during his rule, according to Chad’s truth commission. His trial is likely to start in May or June.

It has been a labyrinthine process. “The case has bounced around for the past 15 years,” says Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based monitoring group, which has been working with victims of Mr Habré to bring him to justice. They filed a case against him in 2000, whereupon he was indicted by a Senegalese court and arrested. But Mr Habré had powerful friends in Senegal. Its government interminably dragged its feet.

But in 2012 Belgium, where the victims had sought justice invoking an unusual law that enables it to prosecute anyone for human-rights abuses wherever committed, won a case against Senegal at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s main judicial organ for adjudicating disputes between states.
The court ordered Senegal to prosecute Mr Habré or extradite him. A new Senegalese president, Macky Sall, gave the case a fresh lease of life, with the eager backing of Aminata Touré, an anti-corruption campaigner who served as his prime minister until last summer. With the endorsement of the African Union (AU), they oversaw the innovative creation of the Extraordinary African Chambers.

By contrast, the AU has been increasingly hostile to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has sought to bring human-rights abusers to book since its creation in 2002, on the ground that it has unfairly targeted Africans; all its indictees have so far been African. Mr Habré could not, in any case, be tried before it, since his alleged crimes were committed before the ICC was set up.

Is his trial likely to herald a new trend, with African leaders brought before pan-African courts? Do not bet on it. Last year the AU said it would promote its own continental human-rights court—but incumbent leaders and their senior officials, it added, must be exempt. The court in Senegal may well be a one-off, but it sets the right sort of precedent for the continent’s abusive presidents.

Source: Economist.com