The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo has sent a top delegation led by his deputy, Fatou Bensouda to the Rwandan capital Kigali for the inauguration of president-elect Paul Kagame on Monday.
According to reliable sources in the President’s office, Ms Bensouda of the Gambia who arrived in Kigali this Sunday is also scheduled to hold talks with the other heads of state who are already in Kigali.
Moreno-Ocampo authorized the visit in the hopes of using it to press African leaders to support the court’s efforts to hold indicted Sudanese leader Omar El Bashir and other alleged criminals accountable.
Top among the leaders the ICC delegation is likely to meet is Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki who invited President Bashir to Nairobi last week as the country promulgated a new constitution, for which Kenya came under severe international criticism for not arresting Bashir.
“We will meet some African heads of state in Kigali and discuss how to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur,” Moreno-Ocampo said in a statement and added : “There is no solution in Darfur without the involvement of African leaders.”
The ICC has been facing intense opposition from African leaders, who have complained that the tribunal has focused primarily on African crimes, carrying out investigations in Congo, Sudan, Uganda, and Central African Republic and now preparing a new probe into Kenyan violations.
President Kagame remains the fiercest critic of the court, and Rwanda is not a signatory to the statute which set it up.
The move to send a delegation to Kigali has drawn criticism from some of the court’s most passionate defenders, who say that the deputy prosecutor’s appearance sends the wrong signal to Congolese victims of alleged Rwandan crimes and to Darfuri civilians who will face dire conditions if Rwanda carries through on its threat to withdraw 3,500 UN peacekeepers from Darfur to protest a UN report on alleged atrocities committed in DR Congo.
“It’s a bad decision,” Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, one of the court’s leading defenders, told Foreign Policy magazine. “This is not about guilt or innocence, which only a court could decide. It’s about association and perception.”
In July, an African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda, decided that “African Union member states shall not cooperate with the ICC in the arrest and surrender of the president of Sudan.” It also rejected a request by Moreno-Ocampo to set up a liaison office with the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to help improve cooperation and understanding of the court’s mandate.
Source African Press Agency
African News from NetNewsPublisher.com
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