Ocampo Should Resign: Missives of Josh Rozenberg

[b6k]

Joshua Rozenberg is a man on a mission. In 2008 he published a series of articles in The Daily Telegraph (UK) which demanded Ocampo's resignation. NB: Rozenberg happened to be the Telegraph's Legal Editor at the time.

Given the amount of confidence Kenyans have invested in this man, Ocampo, to give us justice, it behoves every one of us to hear what Rozenberg had to say & decide if the fate of our country is in the right hands. Read the links below at your own peril. Prepare to be monumentally disappointed.

On how he failed to disclose exculpatory evidence (hmmm, sound familiar?) in the Lubanga case almost leading to a mistrial:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/lawreports/joshuarozenberg/2236288/Why-the-worlds-most-powerful-prosecutor-should-resign-Part-1.html

On his personal sexual misconduct & subsequent sacking of a staff member who filed the complaint against him (the sacking cost the ICC £120,000 in damages paid to the sacked individual):

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/lawreports/joshuarozenberg/2446064/Why-the-worlds-most-powerful-prosecutor-should-resign-Part-2.html

On how he unjustly charged al-Bashir with genocide (a charge that allegedly will never stick) in a desperate showboating gimmick:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/lawreports/joshuarozenberg/2700862/Why-the-worlds-most-powerful-prosecutor-should-resign-Part-3.html

...back to the Lubanga case & redacted evidence & the "stay" (suspension) of proceedings due to OTP procedural errors:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/lawreports/joshuarozenberg/2700448/Why-the-worlds-most-powerful-prosecutor-should-resign-Part-4.html

Knowing all the above, doesn't it become abundantly clear that at least UK's defence team know who they are dealing with & they are gunning for an acquittal at the pre-trial stage? They are fully aware going by the Lubanga case that it has taken 3 years & a litany of a comedy of errors (courtesy of the OTP) to get towards the end of the actual trial. Lubanga may be sentenced in early 2012.

[nowayhaha]

www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/Media+erred+in+depicting+Ocampo+as+invincible/-/440808/1246224/-/9xqdaxz/-/index.html

Impunity: The media erred in depicting Ocampo as an invincible silver bullet

In terms of name-recognition, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo ranks up there with the most prominent members of Kenyan society.

His face beams down from the back of matatus. Pubs have been named after him. He is well known as the silver bullet. The towering, bearded Argentine who will “slay the monster of impunity”.

That is the caricature of the prosecutor that the media have drawn over the last three years.

And it explains the massive billing his confrontation with Uhuru Kenyatta on Thursday received.

It was supposed to be a gladiatorial contest in which one of the parties would deliver a devastating blow against the other.

In the end, it turned out to be a rather tame courtroom exchange with neither party landing any telling blows.

What followed was a surge of responses on Facebook and other social media sites. What happened to the prosecutor? How could he fail to draw blood from UK? Where is the foolproof evidence we had been told to expect.

In the end, these shocked reactions reflected the impossibly high expectations we had created of the ICC action in The Hague. The impression abroad in the land was that Mr Moreno-Ocampo could single-handedly identify the suspects, swoop in with a platoon of US marines and take them away to a prison very far away.

In fact, the ICC process is a laborious one that grants the defendants the same rights as their accusers and aims to achieve justice through a credible and transparent process. The media should have done a better job of explaining this to manage public expectations.

This is what Sir Geoffrey Nice wrote in an article in the London Review of Books before he took any part in the Kenya case:

“All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most important, by a vigorous press. (The ICC is) effectively free from these controls. The UN is not a governmental institution willing to analyse critically the work of its courts. Within the UN, criticism is unwelcome...As for the media, international criminal courts are mainly of interest in the country where the alleged crimes were committed and where the perpetrators and victims lived…There is a real need for critical, even skeptical journalists to oversee war crimes trials.”

It is entirely understandable why the media invested so much hope in the prosecutor and resisted any attempt to be more skeptical. Like many right-minded Kenyans, most editors and reporters wanted to see the perpetrators of the violence brought to book.

I was one of the worst offenders. I recall coming across the judgment in the Abu Garda case where one of the judges in the Kenya case, Cuno Tarfusser, issued a scathing critique of Mr Moreno-Ocampo saying that the factual errors in the prosecution’s case were such that reviewing the evidence was a “waste of precious judicial resources”.

I decided not to pursue the story because I thought it would be seen as being unsupportive of the ICC. I had the same reaction when I saw a piece in the Guardian by the legal analyst Joshua Rozenberg saying Mr Moreno-Ocampo should be forced to step down (I have put the links to these articles in the online version of this column).

All this is not to suggest that the Kenya cases will be thrown out. Far from it. Unlike a jury system where impressive courtroom performances can win a client’s release, this is a system where the judges will make a call based on the evidence they have. We do not know what is in the redacted documents. The judges may well decide that some doubt exists and that the defence submissions on the weakness of the case should be tested at trial.

But from a Kenyan context it would be prudent for the media to manage public expectations – as to their credit only the Nairobi Law Monthly have done so far – by pointing out that the case could go either way, that no ethnic groups are on trial in The Hague and that the central figures in this case, including the chief prosecutor, are mortals with strengths and weaknesses in equal measure.

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Why-the-worlds-most-powerful-prosecutor-should-resign-Part-4.html (Telehgraph UK)

www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc819602.pdf(Pre-trial chamber decision on Abu Garda)

[b6k]

Nowayhaha, that's the article that prompted me to google the anti Ocampo missives of Joshua Rozenberg. If you read them all, you are left wondering how this guy has managed to retain his position as chief prosecutor.

His performance against UK was not an abberation or a strategy. He ALWAYS gives the impression of being ill-prepared for his cases. Little wonder he's managed to convict ZERO suspects to date.