 |
| burned baby one of of Kenya’s PEV victims. |
The victims claim granting Kenyatta his request will make the UNSC make such approvals each year for the period the Uhuru will legible for being the president of Kenya which, should he win successive election, can run up to the year 2023.
“If the Kenyatta trial is delayed until Mr. Kenyatta finishes his
term of office 2018, or, if re-elected, in 2023, there is a real risk
that the interests of the victims will be totally extinguished. The
voice of the victims must be heard on this issue. They were not invited
to address the recent AU summit in Addis Ababa, nor to address
the Security Council,” reads part of the letter.
”In meetings in Kenya with hundreds of victims of the crimes
charged in the Kenyatta case over the past few months, victims have told
me of the appallingly brutal treatment which they suffered during the
post-election violence in January 2008, of the Kenyan Government’s
ongoing failure to help them, and of their great distress at efforts by
Mr. Kenyatta to avoid trial.”
The victims claim the Kenya government government has no political
will to bring post-poll suspects to justice. Despite numerous promises,
the victims see no effort by Kenyan authorities to prosecute nor justly
compensate them. They instead, claim that the accused, Mr Kenyatta,
continue to devote ‘huge state resources at the international levels to
bring his trial – their only hope of justice – to an end’.
According to Gaynor, should UNSC grant Uhuru’s request based on
Kenya’s demand that the council invokes article 16, the government of
Kenya may use that single premise to demand for excusal on annual basis
till Uhuru leaves power; and the UN will be obliged to grant such
requests.
The victims said such a scenario would be ‘regrettable’ as it would
require the Kenyan Government to “summon together evidence in order for
it to be able to convincingly argue, each year for the next decade,
that there exists a threat to international peace in “the Horn of and
Eastern Africa”.
The victims claim the government would then only strive to prove
that a threat to peace exists. Already in Kenya, sceptics argue that the
sporadic violence which has engulfed most parts of the country are
‘manufactured’ to add to Kenya’s narrative that both the country and the
region are volatile and unstable and that subjecting Uhuru to trial
only degenerates the situation into a crisis.
“To protect the powerful and delay or deny justice to the powerless
should not become the role of the Security Council. But the suggestion
that serving heads of state and government should be immune from
international justice was recently approved by the AU’s heads of state
and government despite the fact that one of the AU’s founding principles
is the “condemnation and rejection of impunity,” reads the letter.
“The issuance each year of a Security Council resolution exempting
Mr. Kenyatta from trial will send forth an even stronger message of
impunity,” adds the letter.
President Uhuru’s case which was due to commence on November was
pushed to February under circumstances which has baffled observers of
the case, vowing to the fact that the second accused, also an executive
member of the ruling government, already has his case ongoing.
Other Kenyans also wonder why only the President and Deputy seem to
get personal reprieve from the ICC unlike the third accused, radio
journalist Joshua Arap Sang, whose request last week to return to Kenya
and attend his younger daughter’s graduation (sic) from Kindergarten to
primary school was denied.
The letter has been copied to the 15 states sitting on the UNSC
as well as ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and Uhuru’s lead counsel
Stephen Kay, QC.
No comments:
Post a Comment