UN official asks Hague to take over post-poll violence cases

The UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings has urged the International Criminal Court to take over cases of killings during the post-election violence even as Kenya grapples with whether or not to form a local tribunal.  

Although Prof Philip Alston wants the government to establish a Special Tribunal as per the Waki Report, he said the ICC should, in the meantime, take over the investigations.

“The Prosecutor of the ICC (Moreno Ocampo) should immediately undertake, of his own volition, an investigation into the commission of crimes against humanity by certain individuals in the aftermath of 2007 elections,” Prof Alston said.

Fact-finding mission

He was releasing his preliminary report after a 10-day fact-finding mission on the killings in Kenya. The Government has until March 1 to establish a local tribunal to try post-election violence suspects.

MPs, however, voted against a Bill that would have protected the tribunal by entrenching it in the constitution. Parliament has since adjourned.

Mr Justice Philip Waki’s team which investigated the chaos had proposed that if the local tribunal is not formed, suspects listed in an envelope that was handed over to former UN chief Kofi Annan should be handed over to ICC.

On Wednesday, Prof Alston said formation of a local tribunal is vital if justice is to be done “and if appropriate lessons are to be learned before the next elections.”

“An international tribunal cannot possibly achieve justice on a broad scale in this regard,” he said. He said he regretted that civil society and international community had been “remarkably passive” in response to opportunistic efforts by politicians with a clear vested interest to undermine the steps required to create the Special Tribunal.

Prof Alston said it was crucial for ICC to also be involved as it tries the “big fish” to follow-up on incidents that plunged the country into a near ethnic warfare.

His visits in Nyanza and Rift Valley provinces, he said, gathered detailed evidence from victims of police violence “involving indiscriminate shooting, with little or no relevance to the exigencies of controlling rioters or looters.”

He said he was perturbed that police in the Rift Valley province said they had not opened investigations into the killings because no one had complained. In Nyanza province, he said, police said they had forwarded 60 files of the 85 cases they had recorded of those killed by bullet wounds to the Attorney General for assessment.