C.Africa Conflict Special Court: A Breakthrough Facing Challenges

Mohammad Ali (@ChaudhryMAli88) Published April 18, 2022 | 10:30 AM

Bangui, Central African Republic, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 18th Apr, 2022 ) :Central African Republic's Special Criminal Court, a hybrid court of local and foreign magistrates charged with trying war crimes and crimes against humanity committed since 2003, opens its first trial Tuesday, seven years after its formation.

In car, the rule of law is threadbare, eroded by decades of civil wars, the last of which began nine years ago and is ongoing. With some two-thirds of the country in militia hands as recently as a year ago, the tribunal has had to overcome a litany of obstacles.

Nothing can be taken for granted for the court which is struggling to assert its authority against executive power.

President Faustin Archange Touadera is accused by the UN, EU and France of cosying up to Moscow and the Russian private security company Wagner, and of exploiting his country's vast mineral wealth in exchange for its protection against rebels.

While the court has been praised by some as a model of justice prime for exportation to other countries blighted by civil war, others doubt its actual effectiveness.

The chief criticism is that it has been slow in opening its first trial of three alleged war criminals.

The court was created in 2015 with the backing of the United Nations and is made up of national and international judges and prosecutors from France, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

On Tuesday it will hear its first trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in May 2019.

The defendants are members of one of the most powerful armed groups that have terrorised the population for years, the 3R.

They are accused of massacring 46 civilians in villages in the northwest of the country.

The trial, which has not been publicised by the government despite international NGOs and foreign jurists hailing it as "historic", comes exactly five months after officers from the SCC arrested former rebel chief Hassan Bouba at his ministry in Bangui.