Kenyan cases at the ICC debated in Washington
What you need to know:
- Neither of the two parties — the ICC and the Kenyan Government — were represented in the Tuesday four-person panel, whose members presented conflicting views on issues of witness intimidation, political interference by outside parties and the impartiality of today’s system of international justice.
Washington DC
Supporters and critics of the Kenyan cases at the International Criminal Court traded jabs in a debate at a university in Washington.
Neither of the two parties — the ICC and the Kenyan Government — were represented in the Tuesday four-person panel, whose members presented conflicting views on issues of witness intimidation, political interference by outside parties and the impartiality of today’s system of international justice.
“The ICC has shot itself in the foot,” declared Regina Njogu, a Kenyan who practises human rights law in the US. She accused the court of failing to honour the presumption of innocence, and of bribing and coaching witnesses to give false testimony.
ALLEGED COLLUSION
ICC investigators have “colluded with civil-society organisations” and have paid Kenyans to testify against the leaders, she charged.
Ms Njogu suggested that the ICC was being manipulated by the European Union, which, she said, supplied 60 per cent of the court’s funding. “That kind of financial muscle is connected to this interference,” she claimed.
Those allegations were rejected by two of the other panellists —Michael Greco, a former president of the American Bar Association, and Stephen Lamony, an adviser on AU and UN matters for an NGO that supports the work of the ICC.
“You’ve made statements I believe are not fact-based,” Mr Greco told Ms Njogu.
It is the Kenyan Government that has created “a climate of fear” that has led many prosecution witnesses to withdraw from the cases against President Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto, Mr Lamony said.
