PHOTO | FILE President Uhuru Kenyatta speaks at a past function. The
International Criminal Court has postponed indefinitely the trial of
President Kenyatta that was to begin on February 5.
NATION
The International Criminal Court has postponed indefinitely the trial of President Kenyatta that was to begin on February 5.
The
court has instead ordered that a status conference be held on that day
to discuss, among others, Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s request to adjourn
the trial for three months to enable her undertake further
investigations in the case.
Ms Bensouda last month
revealed that she did not have sufficient evidence to try Kenya’s
President Kenyatta for crimes against humanity and asked the ICC judges
to adjourn the case to allow her gather more evidence.
RECEIVE AN UPDATE
The
prosecutor said she would only continue with the case once satisfied
that the new evidence would be enough to support the case.
Read
the order signed by Trial Chamber V (b) judges Kuniko Ozaki
(presiding), Robert Fremr and Chile Eboe-Osuji: “The Prosecution also
requested that a status conference be convened…in order for the Chamber
to receive an update from the prosecution on the additional
investigative steps being taken.”
The judges further
revealed that following the prosecutor’s request, President Kenyatta’s
defence had filed a confidential response requesting the chamber to
terminate the proceedings on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
The
judges said the chamber had vacated the trial commencement date “in
order to give thorough consideration to the requests pending before
it...without prejudice to the position of the chamber on the
aforementioned pending requests.”
The court decided
to schedule the status conference on February 5 to facilitate a fair and
expeditious proceedings and to discuss the issues raised by the parties
in relation to the prosecution request and the defence response, the
judges said.
The judges said given the new and
distinct issues of law raised by the defence in seeking termination of
the case, they found it appropriate that the prosecution should fully
respond to them by January 31.
They said that in
asking the court to terminate the charges against the President, the
defence made their application confidentially, with a promise to file a
public redacted version in due course.
“The chamber
notes that this has yet to occur, and orders the defence to file a
public redacted version of its response no later than Tuesday, 28
January 2014,” they said.
They went on: “In this
connection, the chamber notes that the prosecution indicated that the
prosecution request to reply was filed confidentially because it
addresses matters raised in a filing so designated.”
The
judges ordered the registry to reclassify as public the prosecution’s
request to reply as soon as a public redacted version of the defence
response has been filed.
No comments:
Post a Comment