اليوم ترحب حرب الطغيان القانونية بإيفانز موناري، الذي يحظى بإحترام كبير من قِبَل كبار محامي التقاضي في كينيا، والذي “يمثل عملاء مختلفين في الاستجوابات والتحقيقات العامة. وقد ظهر أيضا للدفاع عن الهيئات العامة، ولا سيما الشرطة الكينية، وعدل الحقيقة ولجنة المصالحة، ولجنة مكافحة الفساد بكينيا في أمور عدة. وقاد بنجاح في عام 2011 العديد من المحامين الجنائيين الدوليين للدفاع عن الجنرال محمد حسين علي، الرئيس السابق لشرطة كينيا، أمام المحكمة الجنائية الدولية في لاهاي” وذلك كما ورد بالسيرة الرسمية لشركة المحاماة الخاصة به.
أفعال إيفانز موناري
أصدرت المحكمة الجنائية الدولية يوم الخميس الماضي أربعة قرارات هامة بعد أسابيع من السكون القضائي وذلك من خلال ثلاثة أجهزة مستقلة من الناحية النظرية.
أغلق الإدعاء رسميًا قضيته – بالضبط بعد عامين من بدء نظر القضية، وبعد أربع سنوات من جلسة التأكيد. أعطت الدائرة الابتدائية فرق الدفاع فرصة للطعن في سبع قضايا منبثقة عن قرارها المثير للجدل المتمثل في الاعتراف بشهادات خمسة شهود والتي قد تم انكارها من قبل.
وفي عرض جانبي بهدف التشتيت فضت الدائرة التمهيدية مذكرتين جديدتين للقبض على بول جيتشرو، وفيليب كيبكوتش بت، وهم كينيون متهمون بالتدخل في شهادة الشهود، كم أكدت على مذكرة قائمة بالقبض على والتر بارسا.
ليس من باب الصدفة أنه قد تم تسليم هذه الأحكام في وقت واحد.
Evans Monari is a senior litigation attorney in Kenya who has, as noted in his official firm biography, “represented various clients in public inquiries and inquests. In 2011 he successfully led several international criminal lawyers in the defense of Gen. Mohammed Hussein Ali, former head of the Kenya Police, before the International Criminal Court at The Hague.”
By Evans Monari • Lawfare Tyranny
After weeks of judicial inactivity, the International Criminal Court last Thursday issued four significant rulings, by three theoretically independent organs.
The Prosecution formally closed its case — exactly two years after the case opened, and four years after the confirmation hearing. The Trial Chamber granted the Defence teams the opportunity to appeal seven issues emanating from its controversial decision to admit the recanted statements of five witnesses.
And, as a distracting side show, the Pre-Trial Chamber unsealed two new warrants of arrest for Kenyans accused of witness interference, Paul Gicheru and Philip Kipkoech Bett, and reaffirmed an existing warrant of arrest for Walter Barasa.
It is not coincidental that these rulings were delivered simultaneously.
By Shawn Macomber • Lawfare Tyranny
A group of Kenyan victims of 2007 post-election violence have a message for the International Criminal Court that has been holding itself up as their savior and advocate: Leave us alone!
Via the Daily Nation:
A frustrated IDP Network Kenya on Monday said that ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had failed to give them the justice they anticipated.
Mr Nelson Owegi, the network’s national organizing secretary and Kisumu coordinator Maureen Opondo also asked the ICC to relocate its office situated in Nairobi.
“The office of the ICC should leave us alone. We had a lot of expectations and the ICC has over time crashed them with every step they take,” Mr Owegi told journalists in his Kisumu office on Monday. […] “We no longer expect justice from them and we just want them to go.”
The ICC’s failed prosecutorial adventure in Kenya has been previously dubbed both “very, very amateur” and a “sinister” conspiracy, but the stark, brutal criticism from victims themselves is sure to raise eyebrows throughout the region and world, reinforcing the growing consensus that the ICC fruitlessly chases atrocities without deterring them.
By Shawn Macomber • Lawfare Tyranny
As he awaits his fate at the hands of Dutch immigration authorities, Mathieu Ngudjolo — the first person acquitted of crimes against humanity charges by the International Criminal Court — has given a fascinating interview about his nearly five years imprisoned at the Hague wherein he discusses his bafflement at his charges (“There were people who were much more powerful. The leader of the FNI, [Floribert Ngabu] even testified as a witness, but no charges were brought against him. The Congolese president [Jospeh Kabila] was never indicted either,”) his daily activities (case-building, tennis, football), the strange bedfellows an international prison makes (“When I arrived in 2008 it was calm because there were not many people. Lubanga and Charles Taylor [ex-president of Liberia] were there already; Jean-Pierre Bemba [ex-vice president of the DRC] and others came later. But there were no problems at all. Never. At night we all had dinner together”), and a host of other interesting tidbits.
What’s most surprising, however, is Ngudjolo’s undeterred support for the Court (!):
I still support the court. The world needs a strong ICC and I’m the first one to back it. But currently it is not functioning well. We need people and politicians who support it so the court can prosecute everyone. At the moment many people are not prosecuted for political reasons.
Here are three thoughts on the epic understatement, “currently [the ICC] is not functioning well”:
By Shawn Macomber • Lawfare Tyranny
Kenya recently settled its outstanding 2014 “contributions” to the International Criminal Court with a €26,110 ($28,542) payment, according to the Court’s Report of the Committee on Budget and Finance issued last week.
This might seem like a princely sum to the average Kenyan subsisting in a nation with a per capita GDP of less than $1500, but it is an atomic particle compared to how much the ICC has spent on its reportedly “very, very amateur” pursuit of Kenyan leaders:
Notification of 26 June 2014 for €1,369,900 ($1,522,091) and further notification of 10 October 2014 of the revised estimate of resources required of €782,900 ($870,295) for the purposes of funding prosecutorial activities related to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome Statute and for witness relocation and assisted moves in the situation in Kenya.
Of course, even a money furnace like the ICC can revise costs downward amidst ignominious failure — while, naturally, deflecting blame and insisting an unwilling world play army on its behalf — but, considering the Court’s sorry record, it is exceedingly difficult to believe those funds wouldn’t have better served the Kenyan people via direct aid and/or civil society nurturing organizations.
A gaggle of starry-eyed world government apparatchiks bumbling in and out of volatile internecine conflicts, frequently making bad situations worse, then leaving has not exactly worked out. (Good luck, Israel/Palestine!)
Perhaps it is time to try a fresh approach?
by Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin
Al-Shabab, the Somalia-based terrorist group, appears to have adopted a new strategy to turn its Islamist war into a nationalist conflict targeting Kenya. Following al-Shabab’s military setbacks at the hands of African Union Mission Somalia (AMSOM) troops deployed to Somalia, the group’s operations may have shifted from tactical battles to spectacular acts of terror against Kenyan civilians.
Al-Shabab has been responsible for several recent operations inside Kenya that have commanded the attention of the world’s media. These terrorist spectaculars have included among others, the Westgate Mall slaughter of September, 2013; the killing of bus passengers in the Mandera District of the Northern Province in November, 2014; the assassination of quarry workers near Koromey township on 2 December 2014; and the mass murder of students in the area’s Garissa District in early April of this year. Continue reading
“The Chamber noted factors including the Prosecution’s admission that the evidentiary basis remains insufficient to support a conviction and the Prosecution’s concession that it remains speculative whether the information sought in the cooperation request would, even if obtained, be sufficient to support the charges…”
So reads a statement issued by the International Criminal Court Trial Chamber shortly after the Court’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda backed away from its pursuit of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta.
The term “Lawfare,” as defined by the Lawfare Project, “denotes the use of the law as a weapon of war, or more specifically, the abuse of the law and legal systems for strategic political or military ends.”
Could there be a better description of the International Criminal Court’s ambiguous and selective prosecutions, particularly in Africa?
Does anyone seriously doubt there are open-and-shut cases that could be more effectively brought against nations outside Africa if those nations lacked powerful friends and benefactors? Is Kenya seriously on par with, oh, North Korea?
“I supported the court at first because I like discipline,” Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni said. “I don’t want people to err without accountability…but they have turned it into a vessel for oppressing Africa again so I’m done with that court. I won’t work with them again.”
The hands of all African leaders are not free of blood, of course, yet many Africans are beginning to see the ICC less as a fair and lawful entity than a club of cynics arbitrarily imposing its operational and political agenda.
By failing to establish itself as an institution of credibility, and using its own yardstick and political motives to promote a so-called justice, the ICC fails Africans as well.
By Shawn Macomber
It’s not as if one would expect the defense attorneys who secured the dismissal of various crimes against humanity charges against Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta at the International Criminal Court last year to be sending metaphorical roses to Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda through the media, but the comments recently recorded by The Independent go a long way to elucidating the structural issues within the way the Court does business — and how a mission to achieve justice can quickly morph into the sort of campaign of self-congratulations that irrevocably undermine it.
Kenyatta’s team claimed that prosecution witnesses had made up their accounts for personal gain, and they fell apart under the scrutiny of the £1m-plus investigation on behalf of one of the continent’s wealthiest men. “It needs a new director of investigations [for the ICC] to subject their procedures to the microscope from top to bottom and put it in a 21st-century context,” said Gary Summers, part of the legal team for Kenyatta. “[It was] just very, very amateur with a lack of professionalism and a lack of rigour”…
“Everybody wanted to have prosecuted and convicted a senior African politician to justify their institution,” said Kenyatta’s lawyer, Steven Kay QC. “Because it was an African leader, as far as they were concerned, they didn’t have to provide the same standards as they would do in other cases.”
Bensouda, naturally, interprets the state of play quite differently, blaming Kenyan government’s lack of cooperation for the debacle.
By Shawn Macomber 
Here are five can’t-miss reports and opinion pieces for those keeping tabs on the efforts and excesses of the International Criminal Court…
First, citing the botched pursuits of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and Sudanese President Omar Bashir, Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center Joshua Meservey presents an excellent breakdown of the Court’s recent African misadventures. And while he endorses the ICC mission in general terms, Meservey is nevertheless is scathing in his summation of its current iteration:
