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African press review 17 June 2015

A constitutional crisis looms in South Africa as the executive, parliament and judiciary braze for a fight over the country's ICC statute after Pretoria allowed Sudan's Omar al -Beshir to flee arrest.

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Laughter and snorts of incredulity litter Wednesday’s South African press after a Cabinet spokesperson restated the Government’s determination to enquire the circumstances under which Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir left the country. Bashir, who travelled to Johannesburg to attend an African Union Summit, fled back to Khartoum on Monday, as a Gauteng high court tried to stop him from leaving.

Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal ICC for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed in Darfur. Two warrants of arrest were issued against him in 2009 and 2010. As a member of the ICC, South Africa was obliged to arrest him and surrender him to the ICC.

Mail and Guardian reports that a full bench of judges presiding over the high profile matter on Monday upheld the view that Bashir should have been detained by South African authorities as ruled in the court order. But according to the paper African Union chairperson Robert Mugabe said at a media briefing following the closing of the AU summit that President Jacob Zuma had vowed to not allow police to arrest the Sudanese President..

City Press asked Professor Bonita Meyersfeld, director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and an associate professor of law at the School of Law, University of Witwatersrand, what she makes of the controversy. She says that South Africa has violated international law not once, but at least three times with its treatment of Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir.

Meyesfeld pointed to a first violation when Pretoria allowed him in in the first place and did not arrest him, thereby failing to fulfil the obligations of the terms of the Rome Statute which they ratified.” The second violation, she cited, was that he was welcomed at the African Union gathering in Sandton, Johannesburg and the third, when he was allowed to exit the country in defiance of a court order, according to City Press. Professor Meyesfeld also pointed to what she believed was South Africa’s steady shift to more conservative policies.

“We are no longer a poster child for human rights” she noted, warning that "Pretoria is now adopting a position on human rights that aligns itself with the likes of China and Russia, which are the most unpleasant set of bedfellows.”

BusinessDay warns that the government’s flouting of the court ruling ordering arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has caused a looming constitutional crisis, as the matter is to be taken up by opposition parties in Parliament.

According to the paper, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, SA’s special envoy to South Sudan, is likely to be grilled about the circumstances of Mr Bashir’s illegal departure when he answers questions in the National Council of Provinces on Wednesday. President Jacob Zuma could also be questioned on the matter when he appears in the National Assembly on Thursday to answer MPs’ questions.

Opposition party MPs, it reports, are demanding that the government be held accountable for contravening a court order and violating an international statute that Parliament ratified.
Jeremy Sarkin a South Africa Law Professor and Attorney of the High Court of South Africa holds in a column written in today’s Cape Argus newspaper that letting al-Bashir enter SA is proof that this country has sided with the AU at the cost of its human rights obligations.

Meanwhile Sudan’s army has denied a report that its troops surrounded bases in Darfur where South African peacekeeping forces are stationed as tension mounted over the fate of President Omar al-Bashir in Johannesburg. Netwerk24 earlier cited unidentified military officials as saying Sudanese soldiers had encircled the bases as a South African court debated Bashir’s potential arrest on war-crimes charges. About 1,400 South African troops are in Darfur as part of a combined AU, United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force.

The Sowetan posts a satirical comment about the United States expression of disappointment with South Africa’s failure to take action to prevent Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who faces genocide charges, from leaving the African Union conference in Johannesburg.  According to the paper the State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke, in a news briefing, declined to say South Africa should have arrested Bashir but said "clearly, some action should have been taken".

The United States, it must be recalled, are not signatories of the Rome Statute creating the ICC and had been under pressure from the tribunal themselves over the alleged roles of President George W. Bush, ex Vice President Dick Cheney and ex-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in alleged war crimes committed during the US military intervention in Iraq. South Africa "will escape with little more than a slap on the wrist for allowing international fugitive and war crimes accused Omar al-Bashir to escape justice", according to the Times.
 

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