Kenyan president's Hague trial halted in blow to war crimes court
Fri Sep 5, 2014 3:04pm GMT
(Adds Kenyan reaction, prosecutor views, context)
By Thomas Escritt
AMSTERDAM, Sept 5 (Reuters) - The International Criminal Court case against
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta collapsed on Friday as prosecutors admitted
they lacked evidence, casting doubt on whether the decade-old court can hold
the powerful to account.
In a court filing, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said Kenya had not handed over
the bank and telephone records that the decade-old court was demanding,
leaving them without a case ahead of the scheduled October 7 start date.
The case against Kenyatta, accused of stoking lethal inter-ethnic violence
after Kenya's 2007 presidential elections in which 1,200 died, had been
postponed several times as prosecutors tried to gather evidence against him.
The collapse of the case is a severe blow for the Hague-baesd court, the
first permanent war crimes tribunal, which was set up with the aim of
ensuring that people accused of the most serious international crimes face
justice.
"The accused person in this case is the head of a government that has so far
failed fully to comply with its obligations to the Court," ICC prosecutor
Fatou Bensouda said in a filing, asking judges to adjourn the case
indefinitely.
Judges could respond to the filing by throwing out the case, bringing the
case against Kenyatta to an end.
But a prosecution lawyer told Reuters they hoped judges would agree to a
highly unusual permanent adjournment, which would indicate the case had
failed because Kenya authorities had obstructed the investigation.
A DARK DAY
In Naivasha, just north of Nairobi, where some of the worst violence
occurred, victims of the violence said the collapse of the case was a dark
day.
"All our hope in getting justice after the 2007/08 chaos lay with the ICC
but this has been crushed," said Esther Auma, a worker at a flower farm who
said she lost her elder brother during the violence.
Kenyatta, the son of his country's founder, was elected president in 2012.
He immediately began rallying Kenya's African Union allies in a diplomatic
push to have the charges against him dropped, along with those against his
deputy, William Ruto, who is already on trial on separate but similar
charges.
But the case against Kenyatta also struggled in the courtroom, with
prosecutors saying star witnesses had been intimidated into withdrawing
their testimony against the president. Kenyatta's lawyers rejected the
allegations.
Kenyatta supporters said the failure of the case proved that the ICC's
charges had been politically motivated.
Prosecutors had asked for the phone and bank records in a last ditch attempt
to find evidence to shore up their case. They argued that if Kenyatta really
had paid agitators to stir up violence, the transactions would show up in
his bank accounts.
The report had no obvious effect on the value of Kenya's national currency,
the shilling, indicating the extent to which investors had already factored
in the collapse of the case.
For the court, with a string of failed prosecutions behind it, the
development raises questions over whether it will ever be able to hold to
account the powerful, prosecuting alleged perpetrators behind the most
serious crimes.
The court has handed down two guilty verdicts since being set up in 2003,
against two little-known Congolese warlords, and one acquittal. Other
targets, like Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir, wanted for genocide, remain
at large with impunity.
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; additional reporting by Antony Gitonga in
Naivasha, Kenya and Edmund Blair in Nairobi; Editing by Tom Heneghan)