Banjul – Gambian victims’ groups on Wednesday urged the government to take concrete action to extradite the ex-president Yahya Jammeh two weeks after it promised to prosecute him for a litany of alleged crimes.
The Jammeh2Justice coalition of victims’ groups urged President Adama Barrow’s government to seek the support of West African countries in extraditing Jammeh from exile in Equatorial Guinea and prosecuting him.
“We are concerned that … President Barrow conducted a state visit to Equatorial Guinea and did not even raise the subject of Jammeh’s extradition,” the campaign said in a statement.
Barrow participated in an African Union summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, from May 25-28. After the summit, he stayed on for a two-day state visit, spokesperson Ebrima Sankareh told AFP.
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Sankareh said there was little mention of Jammeh during the talks between Barrow and Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, but the two countries agreed to establish diplomatic relations and cooperate on judiciary and other issues.
The visit came just days after The Gambia’s Minister of Justice accepted most of the recommendations of a truth commission, which probed alleged abuses committed by Jammeh and other state actors during his 22-year regime.
The minister promised that the despotic former leader would be prosecuted for a swathe of alleged crimes, from the rape of the beauty queen Fatou Jallow to the murder of AFP journalist Deyda Hydara and the unlawful disappearances of other victims.
“We had hoped that the government would provide greater clarity and detail on the judicial framework it intends to create for those prosecutions,” the campaigners said.
President Obiang has previously promised to protect Jammeh. But Equatorial Guinea has ratified the UN Convention against Torture, which the campaigners said legally requires it to extradite or prosecute the former leader for alleged torture.
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They also said the Gambian government could “make it very difficult” for Equatorial Guinea to resist an extradition request by securing the support of Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, whose citizens were allegedly murdered during Jammeh’s regime.
“A request coming from an ECOWAS-backed court would be very difficult to refuse, but the initiative to create such a court and the impetus for such regional backing has to come from the Gambian government,” the campaign said.
The Gambian government has hired foreign and Gambian lawyers who are expected to submit a report outlining the next steps for a trial, Sankareh said. He added there could be a trial by the end of the year.
He hinted that the government could seek the support of Ghana – “a very important player in the African Union, whose president is the current ECOWAS chair” – in securing Jammeh’s extradition.
In 2005 some 50 African migrants, most of whom were Ghanaian, were massacred by Gambian security forces in one of the most notorious abuses to occur under Jammeh.
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Source: AFP
Picture: Getty Images
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