PH
A ruling by the ICC judges that admits testimony by hostile witnesses against Deputy President William Ruto could complicate his case.The DP’s legal and political teams are very concerned by this latest development. He has spoken to his lawyers about it and the likely consequences. The ruling was delivered late Wednesday and admitted into evidence the prior testimony of hostile witnesses in the ongoing crimes against humanity case at The Hague. According to Ruto’s allies, this has enhanced the prospects of a conviction against the DP and his co-accused, journalist Joshua Sang.
“What I can tell you is that there are concerns about what is going on at The Hague,” a URP lawmaker told the Star. “We are going to ask the DP to appeal the ruling.”
Alex Whiting, a professor of international law at Harvard University, summed up the ruling as “a very significant decision for the case”.
“First, it confirms something that the prosecution has been saying for years, that witnesses were improperly interfered with in the Ruto case,” Whiting told the Star yesterday.
In Parliament, some 40 Jubilee lawmakers yesterday tore into the ICC, accusing The Hague-based court of sabotaging the administration’s efforts to unite local communities.
They said the decision by the ICC trial judges to admit recanted witness statements as evidence against Deputy President Ruto was part of a plot to break up the Jubilee Alliance ahead of the 2017 polls. “The Chamber completely discounted the importance of credible evidence in criminal trial, thereby obliterating basic tenets of justice, marking a new low in the court’s determined descent into travesty,” the MPs said.
They were addressing the press at Parliament Buildings, where they also claimed the “political court” was using the case against the DP to whip up ethnic animosity ahead of the 2017 polls.
In their ruling, the three-judge Bench agreed with Prosecutor Bensouda that there was a systematic scheme to interfere with witnesses in the case.
The Chamber said this gave “rise to the impression of an attempt to methodically target witnesses in order to hamper the proceedings”.
They however did not link Ruto and Sang to the witness tampering.
Ruto and Sang are charged with orchestrating the bloodletting that engulfed Kenya after the disputed 2007 polls.
A similar case against President Uhuru Kenyatta was dropped late last year.
In her application, Bensouda explained the significance of the testimony of the recalcitrant witnesses, saying it had deprived her of a “significant portion” of the incriminating evidence that she intended to present in support of the charges.
According to the heavily redacted 55-page ruling, the core of the witness statements concerned meetings allegedly attended by Ruto at the height of the post-election violence.
Initially, Ruto, through his lawyers, had warned of a scheme to “illegally” nail him at The Hague, saying the prosecution seeks to convict him using “unsworn hearsay statements” of unreliable witnesses.
