Expect no justice for Kenyans held in South Sudan

What you need to know:

  • The High Court jailed Agou and 16 others, who are President Salva Kiir’s staff, after being found guilty of forging the President’s signature to withdraw money from the bank.
  • The court also ordered the 16 accused persons to pay the Executive Office of the South Sudanese Presidency, a sum of $14 million as compensation.
  • The Kenyan nationals were arrested in May 2015 and taken to the National Intelligence headquarters.

Last week, the High Court of South Sudan at Juba sentenced 16 people to life imprisonment, among them four Kenyan nationals, for financial crimes that led to the loss of colossal sums of money by the presidency of that country, following a trial in which the leadership showed great interest.

The circumstances surrounding this case led to a major purge on the staff of the presidency.

The four Kenyans jailed for life are Anthony Keya Munialo, Chuma Boniface Muriuki, Ravi Ramesh Ghaghda, and Anthony Mwadime Wazome. They were jailed alongside a South Sudanese national, John Agou, a national security officer said to be the owner of Click Technologies, a private company based in Juba that specialises in graphic design and sale of computers, where the four Kenyan nationals had been employees.

Agou was jailed with the 16 others, who are President Salva Kiir’s staff, when the High Court found them guilty of forging the President’s signature to withdraw money from the bank.

The court also ordered the 16 accused persons to pay the Executive Office of the South Sudanese Presidency, a sum of $14 million as compensation for the loss that occurred. The court further ordered the seizure of assets of the company involved which are to be sold to defray the amount of money ordered to be refunded.

In the judgement, available only in Arabic with informal English translations, the trial judge also ordered that there should be no visit by lawyers or family members to any of the accused persons during the first 30 days after the sentence. The 30 days embargo on visitation is outside the period allowed for the filing of any appeal.

The Kenyan nationals were arrested in May 2015 and taken to the National Intelligence headquarters where for the next six months they were held incommunicado, not seen by family or produced in any court. At some point the South Sudanese authorities released the Kenyan nationals, informing them that investigations had not established any wrongdoing against them.

The Kenyans used this window to call home and spoke to family, all describing the conditions under which they had been held, which included a regime of one meal a day. When, the following day, they returned to collect their travel documents, they were re-arrested and have been behind bars since then. Subsequently, members of their families travelled to Juba but were denied access to them.

They claimed that the South Sudanese authorities threatened to arrest them as well if they did not leave the country immediately.

In February, nine months after arrest, the accused were finally charged in court. Previously, in November last year, their lawyer had made an application to the High Court, complaining that the accused, who had been held for six months without being taken to court, should be released as the lengthy detention contravened South Sudan’s law, which requires that an accused person be produced in court within 24 hours.

However, the judge rejected the application and referred the matter to the Prosecutor General.

ALTERNATIVE LEGAL REPRESENTATION

When the trial began, defence lawyer, Kiir Chol Deng, complained that he had been denied opportunity to consult his clients to prepare for the trial and that the only time he got to see them was in court.

In the absence of other opportunities to consult, the clients and the lawyer exchanged hand-written notes in court when the case was going on. Chol later gave an interview to The Nation Mirror, a South Sudan newspaper, stating that members of the National Security Service had confronted him outside the courthouse and demanded, at gun point, that he surrenders the notes, which he did. When, thereafter, Chol withdrew from the case, the judge gave the accused one day to arrange alternative legal representation.

At the beginning, the families of the jailed Kenyans had started a media campaign for the release of their family members but they say they were talked out of it by the Kenyan ministry of Foreign Affairs which assured them that it was pursuing the matter through diplomatic channels and that street activism would only jeopardise the chances for their release.

Lately, the families complain that the Foreign ministry has declined any further engagement with them, and following the sentencing of their family members, they feel let down.

One of the political positions articulated in opposition to the Kenyan cases before the International Criminal Court, in which President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto were the accused persons, is that no Kenyan national should stand trial in a foreign court.

Given how little the government has communicated about its effort to save the Kenyan nationals from trial in Juba, it remains unclear what efforts were made to enforce this policy.

Whereas the South Sudanese government appears to have lost large sums of money and understandably wants justice, the manner in which this case has been handled raises glaring questions of due process. A trial in Kenya held under the same circumstances would be considered a travesty and would be overturned on appeal.

The Kenyan nationals who have been jailed say that as employees, they had no role in these matters and that this is a political fight between South Sudanese elites in which they are collateral damage.

In addition to the handicap of weak justice institutions, South Sudan is recovering from a bloody civil war, in which thousands of people have been killed and many more displaced. It is clearly not an ideal place for a foreign national to serve a life sentence.