The Gambia: A defficient legal system against angry victims

The judicial system in The Gambia, long accused of servility to Yahya Jammeh, faces strong pressure from victims of its regime demanding justice after two decades of torture, murder and enforced disappearances.

Jammeh took assylum at the end of January, after more than 22 years at the head of the country and after having contested his defeat for six weeks in the presidential election of December against Adama Barrow. His regime is accused of numerous violations of human rights by Gambians and NGOs in particular.Investigations are under way on dozens of cases of enforced disappearances. According to the police, a dozen arrests, including in the "Junglers", considered as the pro-Jammeh death squads.Since the inauguration of President Barrow, victims and families of victims of abuse of the former regime are urging justice to speed up the pace: to arrest, charge, judge and condemn the alleged perpetrators and torturers."As far as prosecutions are concerned, we are not yet at this stage," Abubacarr Tambadou, Minister of Justice, declared'.It is the short of money and plagued by difficulties in the file of nine former officials of the defunct National Intelligence Agency (NIA, the instrument of Jammeh's repression), Banjul is reluctant to make new arrests.These nine agents were charged with "murder and conspiracy to commit a murder" of Solo Sandeng, opposing Jammeh who died in April 2016 in detention by the NIA. Their trial opened in Banjul on 20 March, but since then the hearings have been regularly adjourned to give time to the prosecutor and lawyers.According to Minister Tambadou, in order to properly tie prosecution cases, it would be necessary to review the judicial system of the country, where foreign judges were traditionally appointed to key positions and were accused of servility to the regime."We have inherited a broken criminal justice system and we need to fix it so we can move forward in future procedures," he said.Illustration of the complexity of the justice mission in the Gambia: On 3 May, Switzerland announced that it extended the pre-trial detention of Ousman Sonko, former Minister of Justice of Yahya Jammeh. Dismissed in September 2016, Sonko fled to Sweden and Switzerland, where he was arrested in January on the denunciation of an NGO that charged him of crimes against humanity.Officially, this extension was motivated by the progress of the investigation but, notoriously, Switzerland does not extradite suspects to countries where they could be executed. 

tags : AFP