19 Sep Prosecution Lineup in the Kenya Case
I don’t know very much about the individual prosecutors, but the lineup doesn’t exactly strike me as indicative of an anti-African, neo-colonialist international organization:
Ms Adesola Adeboyejo is to handle the Muthaura hearings for the Office of the Prosecutor.
Adeboyejo has worked at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR) as a prosecutor and handled the case against Pauline Nyiramasukuko and the former commandant of the non-commissioned officers’ school in Butare, Colonel Tharacisse Mvunyi.
Based on her submissions and evidence before the ICTR case, the court slapped a 50 plus years jail sentence on Mvunyi.
Adeboyejo has also served as a legal officer at the ICC’s Office of Public Counsel for Victims.
She is to be assisted by prosecution counsel Adeboye Akingbolahan, Olivia Struyven, Desiree Lurf, Shamiso Mbivso, Ramu Bittaye, Arthur Siribu and Nawamaka Enjebe.
The ICC has many problems. Lack of diversity isn’t one of them.
As a plethora of briefs and submissions have testified by now, the main problem of the four-head prosecution team in the two Kenyan cases is their lack of legal competence. All are Common Lawyers, and have not been a match to the PTC’s predominantly civil law approach and the expertise of the chamber’s excellent 3 assistant legal officers (Bitti, Chaitidou, Stazzone). This cental weakness in legal education (dabbling in an alien procedural environment which they have again and again misinterpreted, to the – enounced – distress of the PTC) is what has so far hampered *this* prosecution team most.
Ah, diversity….where is your transsexual?
A very important admonishment by Karla. I bow to it (and her).
In the meantime, today the OPT for the very first time in the history of the Kenyan trials gave a *brilliant*, strong, convincing performance. Moreno-Ocampo’s change of the trial team was long overdue, and immediately yielded harvest.