Stefaans BrUmmer
A BRITISH human rights lawyer has released a report highly scathing of the tribunal which condemned Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and others to death, branding it a political charade and “downright dishonest”.
Michael Birnbaum QC, who last year attended the Saro-Wiwa trial as an observer for two British legal bodies, bases his criticism on an analysis of the recently published tribunal judgment. He says it appears the “Civil Disturbances Special Tribunal”, a military court with wide powers, “first decided on its verdicts and then sought for arguments to justify them. No barrel was too deep to be
Saro-Wiwa and eight others were hanged last November — sparking an international outcry against Nigeria — after the tribunal convicted them of the 1994 murder of four pro- government chiefs. The chiefs died in a riot which the tribunal claimed had been instigated by Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoniland independence movement, Mosop, and its youth wing, Nycop.
Three of the condemned men stood trial with Saro-Wiwa, while five were convicted at a separate but concurrent trial, of which the judgment was not made available to Birnbaum.
Among the legal acrobatics Birnbaum says the tribunal indulged in the following:
l The tribunal ruled it did not have to apply Nigeria’s ordinary law of murder. “Instead, it invented a new law of murder based on guilt by
l The tribunal held that senior members of Mosop and Nycop could be convicted “on the basis of alleged threats of violence or killing made at meetings where they were not even present”.
l A senior position in Mosop (or Nycop) was taken as evidence of guilt.
l The burden of proof was reversed. Evidence was taken as true where a defendant had not called a witness to challenge it, and whenever evidence was ambiguous it was interpreted to the advantage of the prosecution.
l The tribunal did not deal with statements from two prosecution witnesses that they and other state witnesses had been bribed to lie.
Birnbaum shows how Saro-Wiwa was convicted though, in the evidence accepted by the tribunal, only a single witness had implicated him in incitement to kill.
The testimony was ambiguous — the witness, according to the judgment, alternatively spoke of Saro-Wiwa having urged youths at a rally to “deal with” or “kill” pro-government figures — but the tribunal chose the interpretation less advantageous to Saro-Wiwa.
The tribunal found that of the four accused, only Baribor Bera was present at the killings. Birnbaum says the tribunal abused its already wide powers by a “judicial sleight of hand” to find that where any of the other accused contributed to the “civil disturbances” they were by association responsible for the murders. Senior membership of a “movement or association” (in this case Mosop and Nycop) was counted as a contributing factor.