In Kenya, the divided government has abandoned efforts to form a
special tribunal to try high level suspects implicated in the country's
post-election violence, and many Kenyans are waiting to see how the
chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague will
respond.
Kenyan
leaders decided this week to refer the cases of suspected instigators
of last year's violence to a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation
Committee, that was established to promote national healing. The
government has offered vague promises that it will reform the
committee's powers to fit its newly expanded role.
The
International Criminal Court has said it would try the suspects, if
Kenyan leaders failed to establish their own tribunal. Former United
Nations chief Kofi Annan, who helped negotiate an end to the violence,
recently turned over a list of key suspects to the International
Criminal Court.
Kamodho Waiganjo, a law lecturer at Nairobi
University, says that, in his view, the government's decision not to
pursue a special court in Kenya was in effect a tacit message to The
Hague that the International Criminal Court will have to handle the
high level prosecutions.
"The proposals that the government
presented to the ICC prosecutor was whether or not to have a local
tribunal in the form of that [agreed upon] tribunal," he said. "So, the
failure to agree to that was basically a surrender of the process to
the ICC, without directly saying so."
ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo has the legal power to begin independent cases against Kenyan suspects at any moment.
Analyst
Waiganjo says he thinks that the chief prosecutor will allow Kenya's
leaders to buy some time as he waits to see what the new truth and
justice committee will look like. However, the law professor says that,
at this point, eventual ICC intervention appears inevitable.
"He
already has enough problems with perception with problems in Sudan, so
he doesn't want to be seen to be railroading African countries,
especially where they feel they have a local solution," said Waiganjo.
"So he's probably going to allow for time. But I don't think it's going
to be a very long time, because he had already given timelines for
September."
With the trial of former Liberian President Charles
Taylor currently under way and with an arrest warrant outstanding for
Sudan's sitting president, Ocampo has been criticized as unfairly
targeting the continent.
The government decision not to
establish a special court to try to try suspects in the election
violence came after the third straight Cabinet meeting ended in
deadlock over the proposed tribunal.
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